Tag: going home

Calling Out to Others

barnstormingblog1 Comment
geese113162
geesev6

A psalm of geese
labours overland

cajoling each other
near half…

The din grew immense.
No need to look up.

All you had to do
was sit in the sound

and put it down
as best you could…

It’s not a lonesome sound
but a panic,

a calling out to the others
to see if they’re there;
~Dermot Healy from A Fool’s Errand

geese913
geese113165

We are here to witness the creation and abet it.
We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed.
Together we notice not only each mountain shadow
and each stone on the beach but, especially,
we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other.
We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power
that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.
We witness our generation and our times.
We watch the weather.
Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house.
~Annie Dillard from The Meaning of Life edited by David Friend

geese1119152

Over the past week, the cacophony from the constant calling of migrating geese has been deafening at times. They pass overhead by the hundreds on their way to their winter homes, sometimes landing in nearby harvested cornfields for a snack.

Soon they are on their way again. Their voices call out, commanding my full attention during the brief time they are here:
going home, going home, I am going home.

I can’t help but notice; they are calling out to anyone who will listen.

It reminds me of my past doctoring work in my clinic; at times I felt overwhelmed by the amount of “noticing” I needed to do as part of my job. Each patient – and there were so many – deserved my full attention for the few minutes we are together.

I would start my clinical evaluation the moment I walked into the exam room, taking in all the complex verbal and non-verbal clues sometimes offered by another human being.

How and why are they reaching out to me? What do they want and need me to notice and understand? I must listen carefully.

I become audience and a witness; even more, I must understand it in order to best assist them. I must rise to the occasion of taking in another person, offering them the gift of being noticed and being there for them, just them.

The doctoring work I did became its own kind of love: the patient became the entire focus for a few moments. I was grateful to be watching and listening.

As my patients called out to me, on their own life journey, may they never have felt they were playing to an empty house.

geesesouth
geese11516

The Grey Disguise of Years

barnstormingblog2 Comments

florabarn

brightnight2

Well-away and be it so,
To the stranger let them go.
Even cheerfully I yield
Pasture, orchard, mowing-field,
Yea and wish him all the gain
I required of them in vain.
Yea and I can yield him house,
Barn, and shed, with rat and mouse
To dispute possession of.
These I can unlearn to love.
Since I cannot help it? Good!
Only be it understood,
It shall be no trespassing
If I come again some spring
In the grey disguise of years,
Seeking ache of memory here.
~Robert Frost from “On the Sale of My Farm”

eveningsky261316

 

From the road, each of the small farms where I grew up look nothing like they did in my childhood.  When I drive past now, the outbuildings are changed and unfamiliar, fences pulled down, the trees exponentially taller, the fields no longer well-tended. Instead the familiarity is in the road to get there, the lean into the curves, the acceleration in and out of dips, the landscape which triggers a comfort and disquiet deep in my cells.

I have never stopped to knock; instead I drive slowly past to sense if I feel what I used to feel in these places.

One clinic day, I glanced at the home address of a young man I was about to see and realized he now lived in my childhood home.  When I greeted him I told him we had something in common: we had grown up under the same roof, inside the same walls, though children of different generations.  He was curious but skeptical — how could this gray-haired middle aged woman know anything about his home?  He told me a bit about the house, the barn, the fields, the garden and how he experienced it felt altogether strange to me.  He and I had shared nothing but a patch of real estate.

I worry for the fearsome ache if someday, due to age or finances, we must sell our current farm ~ this beloved place our children were raised, animals bred and cared for, plants tended and soil turned over. It will remain on the map surely as the other two farms of my past, visible as we pass by slowly on the road, but primarily alive in the words I have harvested here, that sweet ache of seeking it out on the map of my memory.

 

leadogtree

Where to Search

barnstormingblog2 Comments

photo by Josh Scholten

“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.”
Kathleen Norris

I remember well the feeling of restlessness, having an itch that couldn’t be reached, feeling too rooted and uneasy staying in one place for long, especially if that place was my hometown.  I knew I must be destined for greater things, grander plans and extraordinary destinations.  There exists in most human beings an inborn compulsion to wander far beyond one’s own threshold, venturing out into unfamiliar and sometimes hostile surroundings simply because one can.   It is the prerogative of the young to explore, loosen anchor and pull up stakes and simply go.  Most cannot articulate why but simply feel something akin to a siren call.

And so at twenty I heard and I went, considerably aging my parents in the process and not much caring that I did.  To their credit, they never told me no, never questioned my judgement, and never inflicted guilt when I returned home after the adventure went sour.

I had gone on a personal quest to the other side of the world and had come home empty.  But home itself was not empty nor had it ever been and has not been since.

There is a Dorothy-esque feeling in returning home from a land of wonders and horrors, to realize there is no place like home.    There was no way to know until I went away,  searching, then coming home empty-handed, to understand home was right inside my heart the whole time.  There was no leaving after all, not really.

So I’m here to stay–there is no greater, grander or more extraordinary than right here.  Even when I board a plane for a far off place, I know I’ll be back as this is where the search ends and the lost found.

My head now rests easy on the pillow.