What It Means to Say, I’m Home (and Add, Now)

[Slideshow: “Autumn Sonata,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

This week, whiskey river reminded me of Jane Hirshfield — a wonderful poet, a favorite in fact, whose work I’ve gone too mysteriously long without reading:

An Hour Is Not a House

An hour is not a house,
a life is not a house,
you do not go through them as if
they were doors to another.

Yet an hour can have shape and proportion,
four walls, a ceiling.
An hour can be dropped like a glass.

Some want quiet as others want bread.
Some want sleep.

My eyes went
to the window, as a cat or dog left alone does.

(Jane Hirshfield [source])

Hirshfield has often acknowledged her attraction to Zen Buddhism and related spiritual traditions — an attraction which I think is evident in her work even (or especially) when it doesn’t point directly at those traditions. The sense-shape of the poem above, to me, precisely captures the spirit and sense-shape of a koan: simple language bearing riddles in every handful of words, climaxing in a wallop out of nowhere to deliver a “lesson” to you. You can almost picture a master collapsing a fan, swatting you on your puzzled brow, and shouting, “There y’go! Consider yourself enlightened!”… and bursting out laughing.

I think many of my posts here over the years have evidenced the same affection for those traditions, although never — to my knowledge — have they delivered that sort of clout. I’m timid about even using words like “Zen,” “the Tao,” “meditation,” and so on, feeling that they’d bring an unearned didactic tone to the (mostly one-way) conversation here at Running After My Hat. (I say “unearned” because I’m about as far from a teacher of spiritual traditions as I can imagine.) But, well, sometimes a quotation itself makes the link, explicitly… and wholly justifiably.

67:
Returning

Angles against lavender sky
Flung far across heaven’s vault.
Unfettered, swallows
Circle back to the nest.

Swallows are famous for their daring speed and the unpredictable paths that they take in flight. Yet no matter how far they fly, they circle back to their nests.

The idea of returning is significant for all of us. We must work, explore, travel, and make our achievements in life. No matter how much we strain and how wide we wander, we all need some lodestone, some center from which to operate. For some of us, this is a place, a home. For others, it is merely withdrawal into our own hearts.

Followers of Tao believe that there is a core spirit to which each of us should return. This core spirit is increasingly obscured by our own thoughts and the complexity of civilization. All education, while a necessary evil, is a stain upon the primal soul. Therefore, returning is a process of simplification that throws off the unnecessary problems of socialization. One gradually peels back the layers and makes one’s way back to the unsullied, pure inner person. The time to do this is long, and one needs a great deal of guidance and self-cultivation to achieve it, but until one returns to the natural state, one cannot truly hope to be one with Tao.

(Deng Ming-Dao [source])

By this time next week, The Missus and I should be “residing” in North Carolina. The quotation marks denote the obvious: we’ll be in a house, yes, but only temporarily rented, and furnished with someone else’s belongings. I myself lived in NC for only a year, fresh out of high school, and The Missus has never lived there, so in no way will this constitute a “return” for us…

And yet it will be a return, after a fashion: within just a couple of months, I know we’ll stop thinking of it as the landlord’s house. We’re not going to speak of going out somewhere and returning to the address where we started; we’ll simply say We were out, but we’re home now. We’re returning, in short, not to a place we’ve been absent from — but to the idea of a place where we belong: a place that holds us.

That, I think, is the home I’ve been missing.