"In truth home is holographic, existing at full power in a single tree..."
–Dr. Clarissa Estes
Jungian psychologist, master Cantadora, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D. describes home this way, "When we are young and our soul-lives collide with the desires and requirements of culture and the world, indeed we feel stranded and far from home. If we were never taught return to the soul-home in childhood, we repeat the 'theft and wandering around lost' pattern...But, we can all find our way back."
Dr. Estes describes home as, "where a thought or feeling can be sustained instead of being interrupted or torn away from us because something else is demanding our time and attention... a sustained mood or sense that allows us to experience feelings not necessarily sustained in the mundane world: wonder, vision, peace, freedom from worry, freedom from demands."
Although I rarely do yoga, about 18 months ago I attended an Anusara class led by my good friend, Bernadette Birney, and heard in the opening three chants of om – home.
Om is the center of home. There is room inside om. Many rooms–to wander, explore, be. For both Hindus and Buddhists this syllable is sacred. Roughly translated it represents pure spirit. That sounds like a good place to call home.
Amit Ray in Om Chanting and Meditation says, "Om is not just a sound or vibration...It is the entire cosmos, whatever we can see, touch, hear and feel. Moreover, it is all that is within our perception and all that is beyond our perception. It is the core of our very existence." That feels like home.
Swami Maheshwarananda gives a rather all-encompassing view of it in Ibera Verlag, "Sanskrit, sometimes regarded it as three sounds, a-u-m, symbolic of the three major Hindu deities: Bhrahma Shakti (creation), Vishnu Shakti (preservation) and Shiva Shakti (liberation, and/or destruction).
The definition itself offers unexpected insights as well:
home/hōm/
It is the place where you live.
What kind of place? A house with hard-wood floors or a field of Gerbera daisies? A virtual one under a digital roof? Or an inner space of calm curiosity?
Is the question even where? Why can't it be a series of what's? Submersion in a warm bath... the smell of wood burning? The sound of geese migrating? Or is it a time. Dusk, pregnancy, summer. Or who?
As a child and young adult, I thought it must be a type of Secret Garden, real or imagined, that I couldn't find–a feeling of belonging–connectedness. Of something I could not find. Something bigger, I could not explain.
Still, when I have unintentionally abandoned myself and it grows dark and bleak, I find myself pleading, desperately mumbling, "I want to go home, I want to go home, I want to go home..."
So, where is home? Humankind spends billions of dollars on wildlife refuges to protect the homes of the egrit, ibis, crane and wolf yet we give little thought to a refuge, a home, of our own.
Dr. Clarissa Estes describes home as, "a sustained mood or sense that allows us to experience feelings not necessarily sustained in the mundane world: wonder, vision, peace, freedom from worry, freedom from demands."
I see home in the spiritual center of the word itself–the space between the exhaled "h" and the silent "e". The chant inside.
Swami Maheshwarananda says in Ibera Verlag, "Sanskrit, sometimes regarded it as three sounds, a-u-m, symbolic of the three major Hindu deities: Bhrahma Shakti (creation), Vishnu Shakti (preservation) and Shiva Shakti (liberation, and/or destruction). It is said to be "Adi Anadi" without beginning or end and embracing all that exists."
There are no expectations inside om. No rooms to tidy. No beds to make, breakfast to clean, leaky faucets to repair. It expands into a personal universe and contracts back into a blink.
Dr. Estes says, "In truth home is holographic, existing at full power in a single tree... a pool of still water... When you focus with soul-eyes, you will see home in many, many places."
Perhaps home is closer than we think.
Click to Expand
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home http://www.clarissapinkolaestes.com/ http://www.anglicantheologicalreview.org/read/article/1006/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Om http://www.speakbindas.com/meaning-of-word-om/ http://www.atmajyoti.org/med_om_in_upanishads.asp http://om.bluesun.cc/pictures/ http://www.amazon.com/OM-Chanting-Meditation-Amit-Ray/dp/8191026937
Peter Xaviar Kelly
"As the 10th child in a line of 12 children HOME has been an integral and motivating factor in my developement as a person and as a chef". "Home is what grounds me and what inspires me."
Dolores Hayden
If I were sitting in my office at Yale, this would be a conversation about the history of cities, suburbs, and the American landscape. Say it is 1870: we might consider the new designs for apartments versus the familiar shape of the row house. A steam ferryboat might carry us across a river to another dwelling, the suburban house. Later a streetcar might pass through our exchange and vanish. Eventually a metropolitan highway system connects home to work. The thoughts of a woman driving home alone are the subject of my most recent poem, "In the Middle Lane, Leaving New Haven." She considers the stories that roads can tell about the landscapes they cross and the livelihoods embedded within them. (To be continued)
Tammy Burstein
home is where the heart is. an old and time worn adage. in a far less transient time (1st century AD) home was where all we loved lived and had lived; the source of lineage, the place of root, the core of our existence. as the communal body, made up of ever increasing numbers of feelers that stretched out into the wider world, moved farther from the home place, the reach of the heart extended through our moving bodies. and like a turtle or a snail or a nomad, taking home on the road, we carryied the dust of sacred ground wherever our feet took us. home is the ground made sacred wherever we move by the imprint of our feet as we roam both inner and outer landscapes. the body is our mobile home, the breath our fuel, and the beat our motivation to move house with every step, from the heart, as an artist of life, and a lover of being alive. home is where spirit moves us and these bodies are the moving men and women of our inspiration. gabrielle roth's 5rhythms® movement meditation practice is a map to finding home in our feet and our hips, our heads and our hands; a guide to reuniting our separate parts and creating a haven for being wholly home no matter how far we roam from our native soil
Rachel Basch
People of a certain faith tradition refer to being called home as a metaphor for death. We return to the place we sprang from, and everything in between birth and death then can be viewed as a series of radiant trips out from the center. We veer away from the heart of the matter hundreds of times each day. And if we’re fortunate, we are called home, called back to center, called to conscious awareness, before we’ve spun too far out and beyond.
Kelly Coveny
Home has been a tricky place for me to find. I had a beautiful family, lived in a beautiful house, but for me, home existed in a feeling, a spiritual sense of belonging–in the extremely ephemeral intersection of nature and what lies beyond our perception but within our unconscious. Within our deepest memory and imagination. We are taught not to go there. It isn't real. And so, for a long time, it seemed, neither was I.
Then my poppop passed. Then, my mom. Real has shifted. I'm not sure into or out of what. I am merely asking questions–of mythology, of trees, of poetry and art and Ireland. Searching for a sense of belonging.
Poet David Whyte said, "The ability to turn your face toward home is one of the great human endeavors and great human stories. No matter how far you are away from yourself, no matter how exiled you feel from your contribution to the rest of the world or to society, as a human being, all you have to do is enumerate exactly the way you don't feel at home in the world, to say exactly how you don't belong, and the moment you've uttered the dimension of your exile, you're already taking the path back to the way -- back to the place -- you should be. You're already on your way home."
Joe Carvalko
TALE OF TWO HOMES
As a boy I lived between my maternal grandfather's city dwelling and my paternal grandmother's farm, one pitched in the African American quarter across the street from the Blue Moon Bar, the other windblown switchgrass fields. Like a migratory bird caught between two worlds, I'd pine to hear rustling leaves along a country road, yet miss the stride along the blue-noted strip, where sorrows were drowned or heels kicked off in the revelry of Saturday night. By fourteen 5' 10" wiry, skeleton-like, my world changed, jackhammering concrete, breathing asphalt, African-Americans, greenhorn Portuguese, Puerto Rican, Italian, damned to hear the pick, shovel, sledgehammer, laying Portland cement along the roads and strips, and then vanishing into the invisible fabric of our town. As for me I long still to hear leaves rustling along a country road, the stride, the blue notes along the strips, and even the jackhammers that keep me grounded.
FAREWELL MY CITY
I reached seventeen — rebellious,
blackboard jungle moodiness — happines
rheostat turned off. Dig-it Daddio?
Cool black hole of non-conformability,
stumbling through soda-jerk jobs, I quit school.
Night before leaving town, my '52
Chevy and I rode through old neighborhoods,
past factories, docks, the plant where Dad worked,
night shift, helicopter pads, south, across
from the rowboats listing in the river,
a veil of mist kissing the street lamp
lighting mossy green mold that'd attached
to the flaked clapboard side of the theater
facing the river, no lawns, flowerbeds,
factories and their fulminations
reducing trees to wearing nothing more
than ragged leafed sweaters. I only
knew people from the factories, except
summers I'd mingled with rich kids, next town,
making love to skinny debutantes in
flimsy cotton dresses, trying to be
a white skinned cat with black and white saddle
shoes, but morning I'd cross the Housatonic
River Bridge to join the Cold War, away
from the spent, the rich, landmarks memorized
so that someday, unlike Odysseus, I'd
recognize that from whence I came, a place
where everything was familiar and old
Home Video Select a video and click to view. There are currently 7 videos available for Home.
Home
Peter Xaviar Kelly - On The Legacies of Love - Interview
Peter Xaviar Kelly - On The Legacies of Love
Peter Xaviar Kelly - The Heartbeat of Hospitality
Dolores Hayden - Landscape of Loss
Dolores Hayden - On The Topography of Time
Dolores Hayden - Deconstructing Preservation
Tammy Burnstein - Rhythm of Wonder
Tammy Burnstein - On The Body as Refuge
Synchronicity Images
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