{"id":16225,"date":"2014-12-19T10:21:02","date_gmt":"2014-12-19T15:21:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=16225"},"modified":"2014-12-19T10:30:41","modified_gmt":"2014-12-19T15:30:41","slug":"finding-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2014\/12\/finding-home\/","title":{"rendered":"Finding Home"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/24919449\" width=\"600\" height=\"376\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p class=\"smalltext\"><em>[Video: &#8220;Die gut gemeinten Fesseln,&#8221; by Bernhard Riedl, <a title=\"Vimeo: &quot;Die gut gemeinten Fesseln,&quot; by Bernhard Riedl\" href=\"http:\/\/vimeo.com\/24919449\" target=\"_blank\">on Vimeo<\/a>. The title translates as something like &#8220;The Well-Meaning Ropes (or Bonds, etc.).&#8221;]<\/em><\/p>\n<p>From <a title=\"whiskey river: 'Pillow,' by Li-Young Lee\" href=\"http:\/\/whiskeyriver.blogspot.com\/2014\/12\/pillow-theres-nothing-i-cant-find-under.html\" target=\"_blank\"><em>whiskey river<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>Pillow<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s nothing I can&#8217;t find under there.<br \/>\nVoices in the trees, the missing pages<br \/>\nof the sea.<\/p>\n<p>Everything but sleep.<\/p>\n<p>And night is a river bridging<br \/>\nthe speaking and the listening banks,<\/p>\n<p>a fortress, undefended and inviolate.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s nothing that won&#8217;t fit under it:<br \/>\nfountains clogged with mud and leaves,<br \/>\nthe houses of my childhood.<\/p>\n<p>And night begins when my mother&#8217;s fingers<br \/>\nlet go of the thread<br \/>\nthey&#8217;ve been tying and untying<br \/>\nto touch toward our fraying story&#8217;s hem.<\/p>\n<p>Night is the shadow of my father&#8217;s hands<br \/>\nsetting the clock for resurrection.<\/p>\n<p>Or is it the clock unraveled, the numbers flown?<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s nothing that hasn&#8217;t found home there:<br \/>\ndiscarded wings, lost shoes, a broken alphabet.<\/p>\n<p>Everything but sleep. And night begins<\/p>\n<p>with the first beheading<br \/>\nof the jasmine, its captive fragrance<br \/>\nrid at last of burial clothes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>(Li-Young Lee [<a title=\"Google Books: 'Book of My Nights: Poems,' by Li-Young Lee\" href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=79_bHuHyWBsC&amp;pg=PA1#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false\" target=\"_blank\"><em>source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;<a title=\"whiskey river: Wendell Berry, on the home of the now\" href=\"http:\/\/whiskeyriver.blogspot.com\/2014\/12\/the-country-seems-bigger-for-you-can.html\" target=\"_blank\">and<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The country seems bigger, for you can see through the bare trees. There are times when the woods is absolutely still and quiet. The house holds warmth. A wet snow comes in the night and covers the ground and clings to the trees, making the whole world white. For a while in the morning the world is perfect and beautiful. You think you will never forget.<\/p>\n<p>You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can&#8217;t remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise. Speaking of these things tells you that there are no words for them that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind. And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence.<\/p>\n<p>But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. You have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remember now, are of a different life in a different world and time. When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>(Wendell Berry [<a title=\"Google Books: 'Hannah Coulter,' by Wendell Berry\" href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=QOt4uXgUuEUC&amp;pg=PA148#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false\" target=\"_blank\"><em>source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Not from <em>whiskey river<\/em>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>Fox Sleep<\/strong><br \/>\n<em>(excerpt)<\/em><\/p>\n<p>What I thought I had left I kept finding again<br \/>\n<span style=\"margin-left: 1.5em;\">but when I went looking for what I thought I remembered<\/span><br \/>\nas anyone could have foretold it was not there<br \/>\n<span style=\"margin-left: 1.5em;\">when I went away looking for what I had to do<\/span><br \/>\nI found that I was living where I was a stranger<br \/>\n<span style=\"margin-left: 1.5em;\">but when I retraced my steps the familiar vision<\/span><br \/>\nturned opaque and all surface and in the wrong places<br \/>\n<span style=\"margin-left: 1.5em;\">and the places where I had been a stranger appeared to me<\/span><br \/>\nto be where I had been at home called by name and answering<br \/>\n<span style=\"margin-left: 1.5em;\">getting ready to go away and going away<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>(W.S. Merwin [<a title=\"Poetry Foundation: 'Fox Sleep,' by W.S. Merwin\" href=\"http:\/\/www.poetryfoundation.org\/poetrymagazine\/poem\/27666\" target=\"_blank\"><em>source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;and:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>Returning<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Angles against lavender sky<br \/>\nFlung far across heaven&#8217;s vault.<br \/>\nUnfettered, swallows<br \/>\nCircle back to the nest.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>(Deng Ming-Dao [<a title=\"Amazon.com: '365 Tao: Daily Meditations,' by Ming-Dao Deng\" href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/365-Tao-Meditations-Ming-Dao-Deng\/dp\/0062502239\" target=\"_blank\"><em>source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;and:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>After church tonight [on Christmas Eve], back home again, The Boy and his sisters and brother had been bundled off at once upstairs to their bedrooms, their parents&#8217; eyes feverish with some mysterious variety of adult distraction. As he lay in the bed, The Boy could hear, beneath him in his parents&#8217; room, the frenzied rattle of wrapping paper, the soothing <em>zzzzzziiiippp<\/em> of tape being pulled from the roll. The Boy imagined his father carrying armloads of gifts out the back door, tramping in the snow around to the back of the house and handing them up to Santa, who was tapping his booted foot impatiently on the roof, waiting to convey them (as required by law) down the chimney&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Here, upstairs, The Boy&#8217;s siblings slept peacefully, their breathing slow and measured like the imagined sound of all the massed snowflakes now sifting down outside the windows. Even the ghoul beneath the toy chest was quiet tonight, the clicking of his awful claws on the floor replaced, tonight, by the click of reindeer hooves slithering about for a foothold on the icy shingles&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>He lay back against his pillow finally, his eyes shuddering closed with the weight of a hundred anticipations. Outside, the snow continued to fall, picking up pitch and rhythm as The Boy&#8217;s soft breathing joined that of his brother and sisters. And in his now-dreaming mind fluttered the slow easy snow angels of ten thousand memories past and memories yet to be, pressing into the deep drifts of The Boy&#8217;s imagination all the permanent outlines, the wonderful forms, of how it always and forever was.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>(JES [<a title=\"Amazon.com: 'How It Was: Christmas,' by John E. Simpson\" href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/B00H0IMJX6\" target=\"_blank\"><em>source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[Video: &#8220;Die gut gemeinten Fesseln,&#8221; by Bernhard Riedl, on Vimeo. The title translates as something like &#8220;The Well-Meaning Ropes (or Bonds, etc.).&#8221;] From whiskey river: Pillow There&#8217;s nothing I can&#8217;t find under there. Voices in the trees, the missing pages of the sea. Everything but sleep. And night is a river bridging the speaking and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[38,15,247,1393,274,5,36,4,251],"tags":[351,1579,3496,3725,3941],"class_list":{"0":"post-16225","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-backwards","7":"category-family","8":"category-ruminations","9":"category-whiskey-river-runningaftermyhat","10":"category-cartoons","11":"category-06_writing","12":"category-reading","13":"category-howitwas","14":"category-poetry-writing_cat","15":"tag-ws-merwin","16":"tag-wendell-berry","17":"tag-li-young-lee","18":"tag-deng-ming-dao","19":"tag-bernhard-riedl","20":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-4dH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16225"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16236,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16225\/revisions\/16236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}