Home
“We
leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place; we stay
there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can
find only by going back there.”
Pascal
Mercer (Night Train to Lisbon)
If you've been reading
this blog for a while, you know the Great Smokey Mountains are my
“home.” At least, that's where I was born, and where my ashes
will be scattered when I am gone. I know you have that place, too.
Sometimes we live there forever, but when we are displaced (as I am),
we truly understand that some piece of us stays home and waits for
our return. This small quilt is called “Meadow Pines.” I made it
after visiting my cousins in Murphy last spring. I think it may be
like an ugly baby—one only a mother could love. It's disjointed,
disproportional and well...just strange. But it's my connection to
that place where my soul finds rest.
I wonder whether you've
ever walked in a pine forest, one where only pine trees grow and the
ground under them is inches deep in needles. They are almost silent,
and there is a peacefulness about them that one doesn't find in
hardwood forests. Pine forests are places in which reflection, even
meditation, comes easily. In this, they are fundamentally different
from other forests which always seem to be teeming with life—with
birdsong, insect buzzing, and wings flapping. In pine forests,
everything comes to ground, to rest, to stillness. The only other
landscape that I have found to be similar is the desert of southern
Arizona—where the only sound is the wind.
Home, I'm convinced, is
always within us—regardless of where we originate or where we
travel. But there are places on the earth that people walk into and
know they have arrived home even though they have no history there.
The energy is right, and they feel welcome. Warsan Shire put it this
way, “At the end of the day, it isn't where I come from. Maybe
home is somewhere I'm going and have never been before.”
Perhaps our soul lived there before and retained something like
“muscle memory.” Or maybe, the soil of that place is incorporated
into our genetic structure—it's in our cells. I only know this:
some of my cells, some of my soul, live among the meadow pines. What
about you? Where is your home?
In the Spirit,
Jane
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