This Ache For Home (This Is A Far Country)

You might say it was just a house. I saw it as hope for life-long connection; for community. We bought it with the hope of first marriage; the efflorescence of daughter. I put in sprinklers and planted a little lawn. Walked to school with the five-year old. Got a dog; black and white Australian Shepherd, Collie mutt. The neighbors from around the corner brought over cookies.  The neighbor next door complained about the dog. The grass grew; daughter too.

We had birthday parties in the backyard; Spongebob Squarepants and reptile themed. Invited the cookie-givers children; all three. The daughter played with two boys from down the street that brought their parents. Summer days we’d pull up the cheap plastic chairs and chat in each other’s backyards.  In my heart I thought I’d found it---constancy, Americana, neighborhood, a place of permanence.  I was wrong.

It all frayed at once.  The threadbare marriage showed jagged tears.  The two boys houses down moved North with their parents. A kindred had formed with the cookie clan but job loss here meant a new job elsewhere. With the marriage barely intact Providence thrust us out of the house, out of the area and into a place we did not know.

So it goes. This hunger for permanence and place remains. A perceptible ache that is always there below the surface.  This ache for home; for that far country. For we wander “in deserts and mountains and caves and holes in the ground,” til we finally, God willing, come home.

Stagnation Is Easy. Satisfaction Takes Work

“One does not surrender a life in an instant - that which is lifelong can only be surrendered in a lifetime.” --- Jim Eliott

“In the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.” ― Jack Kerouac

The mountain top and the therapists chair are lonely places. Places where baggage is left behind or stripped away. That avocado green Tourister with the extendable handle and Teflon wheels for instance. The angry self-protectiveness that stems from---where?  The crowd isn’t clamoring to give up the perception of safety. Not hungry enough or hurting enough.

The lie is this; satisfaction will come easy. A glimpse of a thing is not the thing itself. The river is beautiful seen from valley’s edge, but you can’t taste it.  Beautiful but it won’t slake your thirst, clean your face, soothe your feet, shake you awake. Have we always been so naive?  Feeling ‘in love’ isn’t the core of marriage; spilling semen isn’t sex. Rendered skin deep we call it beauty.

Time and self are difficult to give up. Deepening relationship requires both. Stagnation is easy. For now the mountain is a picture on your desktop. Personal growth hurts and leaves hollow. Reward seems nebulous.

We commit to the not-yet tangible. Remind ourselves. Short ascents where we push hard, feel shale and smell pine. At home we’re willing to have those deep, tough talks; play and wine with the mate. We do the difficult work. Sit in the lonely places. Listen in the lonely places. Stagnation is easy; satisfaction takes work.

“In a sense everything that is exists to climb. All evolution is a climbing towards a higher form. Climbing for life as it reaches towards the consciousness, towards the spirit. We have always honored the high places because we sense them to be the homes of gods. In the mountains there is the promise of… something unexplainable. A higher place of awareness, a spirit that soars. So we climb… and in climbing there is more than a metaphor; there is a means of discovery.” ― Rob Parker

Swimming

We swim in an alien atmosphere. I remember early voyages. Passing through a white, steel gate; walking down a narrow corridor you smell it. Chlorine saturated water steams from wet cement. An adult beckons; parents push. The first step into clear blue water; foot feeling the tension as it breaks the surface, then the other.  Oh, the cold!

I’m not comfortable entering a pool.  My asthmatic lungs seize up with quick temperature change. I can barely breathe. I’m leaving the safety of air and firm footing. One step down; bathing suit gets wet and heavy. Two steps down then hold to the side, hold to the side! 

Grasping tight the pool’s edge over there is a pile of rectangles; like tops from Styrofoam ice-boxes. Bright colors; cherry red and cobalt blue with corners cut-off. For what purpose?

Inside the pool a line of children hold to the edge. An adult towers over us in a red bathing suit. “Pretend you’re in a big bathtub.  Face down and blow bubbles.” Easy. Each is given an ice-box cover. Trembling and terror, we leave the side. Grasping kick-boards we shove out across the shallow end a line of stick men without arms.

The new house has a pool. Neighbor girls hurl us into cold water. The sink-or-swim school. Dog paddles stave off drowning. Paddles turn to superior strokes. What was fearful now’s freedom.  Summer days spent swimming til cool water constricts blood vessels. We turn purple.

We swim in an alien atmosphere. The sink-or-swim school. Bright colors bid us leave the shallow end to the scary deep. Perhaps freedom awaits!