Finding home

Thinking these days about home.

Last week I was in Prince George working with people who are establishing an Aboriginal school in that city.   I went from there to working with coaches who support Jewish day schools in the United States and Canada.   In both places I felt at home, among people who lived out of a deep worldview, an ancient language and culture and way of life that included spirituality (but not religion per se).   In each case we began with prayers and teachings – from a Lhedli T’enneh Elder in Prince George and in Boston a dvar torah delivered but a lovely and thoughtful Jewish Elder.

Home in both places.   I am a mix of peoples and ancestries, none of which includes Lheldi or Jewish although I grew up in a mixed Christian and Jewish neighbourhood in Toronto and came to my Ojibway ancestry when I was a teenager.   I don’t live in Toronto anymore – haven’t for 20 years now – and I’m far from Ojibway culture, living out on the west coast.   Yet for me, this dislocation from home means that I can find home anywhere.

And what does it mean to find home?   As my friend Teresa said on Sunday, it means discovering people that hold part of your story.   She was relating a story of returning to her grandmother’s hometown in Missouri for her grandmother’s funeral and discovering there people that held the story of Teresa’s family, of her mom and her grandparents who owned the local grocery store during the Depression and helped hold the community together.   What a gift to go home and hear your stories, as if they had lay there for generations waiting to be told.

Finding home means hearing whispers of your story everywhere, it means diving into any situation and seeing your relations there (all my relations) and feeling hosted.   Being at home means being aligned with what is natural, what is constant everywhere, whether it’s in people or landscapes or stories, and using that to rest so that you can experience what is unique and particular to any given situation.

And as my friend Tenneson also said this weekend, it means acceptance of where you are.   You cannot be at home if your mind is filled with the aversion of the present moment or the present experience.   Open to right here and right now is what makes home.   Finding myself in these situations I recognize that I have a choice of how to be, and that home is in my mind and in the way I rest it in the present experience.

Skillfully done, this can mean that you can be a snail, a slow itinerant who carries its home on its back, ready to stop and set up at any given time.   A transient who can live anywhere, open to what is, curious about the gifts of the moment (even the hardest moments) and at home in the world.