to want the heart of home

Have you ever decided to do a major downsize of the stuff you own? I try to do this every so often with mixed results. Often I find myself staring at old books, nicknacks, and writing, not knowing what to do with it. Do you throw it out, burn it in a brave act of moving forward and fresh starts? I mean, honestly, is anybody EVER going to look back on the stuff you wrote and stuffed away when you were sixteen and learn something from it? On the other hand, I feel this odd anxiety, as if I’m saying that everything I did and were ten years ago will be invalidated if I burn it… Its like I want to prove that I really was the kind of sixteen year old some wouldn’t believe my 27 year old self to be. Some of the nicknacks seem like they’re the only things separating my memory from losing people and experiences that I think, for some reason, are significant… though I’m not sure they are.

I suppose we are trapped by time, because we see it as a jail with two walls at either ends of our lives, but these are just two doors, with hints of beauty and tragedy between. Opportunities to love. Opportunities to consider the concept of home.

I took a class which turned out to be surprisingly wonderful this spring. It was a writing class focusing on travel narratives. What is so compelling about the heroes’ journey? What is the truth in a first-person narrative? What is the documentary value of a story? These kinds of questions are what we had the opportunity to mull over. Another was, “what is home?” To help us envision this consideration, came the writer, Julien Hoffman, to lecture to us and to read to us from his book, The Small Heart of Things. I loved it.


“Anywhere has its stories if we look and listen for them
This is what interests me: How do we go about being at home in a world, a beckoning world, graced by murmurs at every turn. “

This spring I took a bunch of nicknacks I’ve collected over ten plus years and went for a long and meditative walk around, what I could consider more than anywhere else, my home town. Conveniently, this town provides a rocky walk along the ocean so that very easily you can find yourself feeling alone with the sea. Then I took the items out of my pocket: mostly things like rocks or carved wood that I had made into monuments along the road - things which I felt weren’t polluting as much as giving back to that great indifference and I threw them in- not all at once mind you. One at a time, with time to contemplate what each one meant to me, then I let it go with a throw. Then I walked on.

“Everything beckons us.”