Home, Wherever It Is (previously unpublished, from some years ago)

A few breaths before afternoon drizzles into twilight, that hushed interval where a blue patina softens the surfaces of the world, October sunlight slants like a shimmering cold knife through the trees in my big backyard in Sacramento and across backyards and housetops beyond. I would open the family room’s sliding glass door and wander outside and simply stand in the day. Never welcoming the night rising in the east, a closing of light, a return to a house where the TV seemed always on, I remember always looking west—to San Francisco, the coast, the Pacific Ocean, years to come; I felt somehow drawn west. October remains the blessed month for this memory, as it was for Kerouac (October for me stands for that autumnal air, the way the day I feels). Summer in its blazing glory threw the sun high overhead and winter dragged it bumping low around the sky, but October freed the light to pulse and pierce the air. I wore a light sweater against early cold and waited for the afternoon’s mystery to rise and linger. Was I waiting for something to happen? Waiting for a question unasked to reveal an answer, like a stone statue blinking dust and turning into a princess? I never knew, and still can’t hold it in my palm. The air was still, the sunlight sharp, and I stood westward as the earth rolled away. You only recognize beauty when it begins to disappear is the last line of a Mark Eitzel song during his time with the American Music Club. The day was disappearing, October disappearing, another year disappearing, and so goes life. That’s precisely what was happening, exactly the answer. And a month or so after having left home in Sacramento for life in the Bay Area (San Francisco, the coast, the ocean), perhaps feeling poor and lonely and distant, I drove home to Sacramento, walked through the family room and sliding glass door to wander again the backyard and linger in the waning afternoon light.

I had left home, but the ghosts remained and waved a kind welcome, the memories imbued in the grass mowed and the silver maple climbed into telephone wires and gnarled plum tree leaning and cracking the cement porch and the pale weathered wooden fence trying to hold the restless dogs within. This backyard was home; it is no longer home, although I feel at home anytime I’m standing in the line of cold sunlight sliding through creaking trees. I have driven by the old house, my mother and father long dead, and once I met the new owners, a young family, their first home. I introduced myself to the lady of the house, and she was overjoyed to meet, anxious to show what she’s done in the house and yard. The yard had changed a bit: I think I spotted a lawn ornament, a fairytale fawn or ceramic bonneted lass gathering invisible berries. The grass appeared designer mowed, as if you’d be scolded for running scrimmage. Growing up I remember proud clumps of weeks, the edges a little unkempt. There is something sinister in the nervous demand for the manicured yard, the ever-renewed battle (waged either by you or immigrants) against wild growth; wanting a lawn that doesn’t offend or require interpretation, but pleases easily like a Christmas with Kenny G album. We had lawns growing up, but we ran and tackled and rolled upon them like dogs. I remember surprises hidden in weeds, whole societies busy with work. Oh where are the frogs of yesterday? Extinct through chemicals, those wreckers of ecological balance. But standing in the backyard no longer my own, the plum tree filled the sky, the loquat held fruit, and the rosemary towered. The lady seemed happy with the yard. She confided in me that often she felt Barbara’s spirit in the house, often thought of her, eagerly hoping my mother approved what she’d done. With tears welling up in her eyes, she received my assurance that my mother would indeed be pleased (for the most part). Here’s another line from a song, Luther Vandross singing the version I heard: a house is not a home. He meant, I believe, his digs felt lonely without his woman. But home is also not a house. When I was standing in my backyard reminiscing with the new owner, I failed to hear the lingering ghosts. They’d packed up and caught the last train for…the coast. Home disappears when the beautiful ghosts stop speaking to you. So I feel little nostalgia for that suburb in South Sac. The house is not a home. Yes, the structure is not the dwelling within. A life is not a body, but the pulsing soul bubbling in the veins and nuzzling the rib cage and rising against muscle and dancing behind the face. Where is home now? We asked ourselves this on our summer flight from Syria to California via Istanbul and New York. Possible answers: Home is where you live, your current address. Home is where you grew up. Home is what is familiar, where you feel welcome. We sit back satisfied when we are “at home.” I’m trying to get at the meaning.

I first felt a strange tug of home in New York’s JFK airport during the layover for our flight to San Francisco. Carry-on luggage bouncing and flipping behind us, I’m leading the charge to the nearest bar like a linebacker on a blitz. Old ladies are shoved out of my path like wiry rookie tight ends. I don’t care how many CDs I had on rotation, only one was spinning: get a good beer that’s not a goddamn mass-produced lager, the only thing available where we live (Heineken is about the best…for what it’s worth) . A micro-brew, Brooklyn’s Brewing Company’s Amber Ale, was on tap. Our waitress dully asked if I wanted a tall one. After recovering from a laughing fit that had my eyes bulging tears and dry mouth a-foaming, I picked myself up off the hardwood floor, rearranged the surrounding tables and chairs in polite order, recovered the knife and fork from the potted plant near Gate 17 where I had flung them after upending our table, and answered yes please. Of course, what you miss is home, but is home simply what you miss? (My ugly god, I’m writing like Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City).

Flying into the Bay Area, California felt like home because our haunts remained humming and getting along fine. We missed bopping down for beers at Jupiter in Berkeley or Cato’s Ale House in Oakland, taking our travel mugs and getting a Peet’s coffee and then pastries at Arizmendi’s on Lakeshore, seeing women walking and talking freely of all ages and ethnicities without the black shroud of invisibility covering them, buying a slice—two!—of Arinell’s NY-style thin slice pizza offa Shattuck near University, taking a walk in the Oakland Hills of bay laurel, redwood, patches of sun like stars splashing upon leaves, wading through Moe’s and Shakespeare and Co. books on Telegraph, and damn did we miss our CA friends. But in the middle of our joy I realized we were experiencing the giddiness of the initial. We were on vacation; we didn’t have to go to work. If we wanted to wake on a Wednesday morning and drive to Ocean Beach, walking along the sandy shore with the joggers and dogs, then hit the Beach Chalet overlooking the Pacific for beer and onion rings, well, we’ll just do that. If we want to meet my old musician friends for beers at Jupiter, sit in Adirondack chairs in the sun in the open air patio, passing guitar back and forth and plucking out tunes for one another like back in the dizay, then bid our farewells because we have to make happy hour at Sea Salt on San Pablo for Tomales Bay oysters on the half shell and fruity drinks, again, we’d manage. But we’re wallowing in all we’d missed: does that make the Bay Area home? We don’t own a house there. The four walls in a prison cell are familiar to an inmate: is it home? A charitable guard can pull strings and tie up a hammock in the inmate’s cell. In it, he can be comfortable: it is home? Paroled, he can return to the prison years later and revisit his old cellblock, which is now filled with producers of Reality TV shows, and the damp and cold dust and whiff of steel urine will trigger memories familiar, but he is far from home, and not comfortable, I’d wager. My long lost friend and old roommate in Santa Cruz, Helen, told me once she went home for the holidays, where she grew up on the East Coast. Sisters and brothers she had, cousins, Mom and Dad. All were there together to celebrate, but she felt dismayed at how little her family appreciated the great effort she’d made getting out there. A single woman, beat reporter for a small weekly newspaper in Santa Cruz, and it was a financial struggle to get back East to join the family (who all lived within twenty miles of each other; no hike for them at all). Though she was home, she felt less at home than a stranger, a tolerated guest. Her heart, where home is supposed to be, wasn’t in it. I’m scraping for a meaning. The notion of home does, of course, include the familiar, the comfortable. I suppose I want to loosen and set adrift the traditional notion, tear it away from the tyranny of home as finally settling down, the shiny gleaming ranch-style with two-car garage of cherishing the fixed. Home is where you land, end up. If that’s the case, then let me show you a bit of real estate Hamlet calls “the undiscovered country, from whose borne no man returns,” very spacious but no views. This is your final resting place. And it’s free. Only a nihilist calls this home. We are semi-nomadic, Carrie and I, for the time. But Syria is our home, in some ways, in a narrow but essential sense, inasmuch as we cut and paste the paper maché scraps of our life in this strange new land. But rain floating from a redwood forest canopy is home when you wander underneath. The wild, free and fertile stillness that rises when the captain cuts the boat engine and you drift where the Pacific’s continental shelf drops off, hushed breathing, where whales swirl and sound, this felt like home to me one afternoon about thirty miles off San Francisco. I feel at home in all kinds of water. Icy cold granite-bowled alpine lakes, mineral rich seaweed rolling Pacific tidal waters that sparkle hues of bronze and blue, rumbling and splashing Idaho mountain rivers, clear cool Lake George whose wind-nudged waves are lapping behind me at this writing, the warm salt waters off Turkey’s coast—it’s all good. Same goes for the day. If the Weather Channel and news meteorologists depended on the likes of me to sustain their livelihoods, they’d be slouching to the poorhouse in droves. What’s the weather going to be like today? I don’t know, peek your head outside. Get thee hence and whoop, dance and sing under whatever skies surround you. I think the only time I wanted to check the weather forecast was when planning a backpacking trip. But even then, rain happens. Thoreau should be our guide and savior in these matters. Don’t huddle and turn against snowstorms; go out and inspect them! I feel blessed I’m at home in all weather heaven choreographs. “Oh, it’s a crappy day out there” you hear radio voices lament if rain is coming down and replenishing the earth and its depleted groundwater sources. This is “crappy”? Hell, you’d think they were announcing the latest round of firing squad penalties being carried out. I take the weather the way I take music: a sunny afternoon is bluegrass; rainy mornings, Joni Mitchell; overcast noons, Coltrane; whipping and raging storms, Mahler. I think I’ll manage to carve out a dwelling any hemisphere I plunk down my bags.

In Syria we have our rhymes and rituals, our daily bread of dreams, we hose and squeegee the dust from the patio and pull up the outdoor furniture, check if there’s ice in the trays, tune my guitar, welcome friends and uncork champagne purchased on a run to the Turkish border. Home is less a place or predicament than dwelling emboldened by the mysterious art of living. Home is sanctuary, enclosed only to safeguard the opening to mystery of being alive. This is why holy places feel like coming home, be they stone cathedrals or Sequoia canopies or Pacific Ocean depths, knowing life thrives underneath. Only the truly mysterious possesses the power to draw, to welcome. Arrange your fixtures and furnishings with the delicate touch handling a bouquet of flowers, vines and leaves. Wait for the feather brush of wind, and then call things that truly matter to you into presence, let them enclose you, allowing a moment to fall into your soul like the twirl and snap of a cold October sun, the moist heart pumping in a clump of moss, the murmur in the burrowing warm dark hole that furry critters call home.

The Pilgrim's Digress

Rosy air hushed o’er soaring ancient mountain peak silence dawning in the high country. Highway 395 nestles in the valley below. Cold snow slithers down steep canyon cliff face and lonely secret valleys. Air is soft here in high desert; the scraggy shooting peaks above me—Whitney, Lone Pine, Williamson—reach into sky and breathing winds don’t blow as much as heave with tidal oceanic power to splash and flood the dry tree line sloping below. Grandest most rugged and highest mountain range in the lower 48 above; across the long Owens River Valley hunched and rolled the Alabama mountains; glistening and sparkling mirror waters of poor shallow Owens Lake streaked under a peeking sun almost humbly requesting permission to rise and glow over this country majesty that had stood proud guarding the earth all through an icy dark star flashed night and could damn well keep watch another thousands nights, but the sun moved carefully and soundlessly and dipped her blessings over all, the peaks warmed in her offerings and let her pass overhead like golden flocks of birds. Further south stretched the rock silence of Death Valley, and north ran mountain ranges and river valleys and sleeping voices of gnarled desert ranch folk and ghosts of Paiute and Shoshone tribes feasting on prophecies and whispering philosophies with lizards and hawks and yelping coyotes rummaging in underbrush. Morning clouds blossomed pink and orange and hovered o’er the vast country bestowing delicate goodness and light. I tread softly, Ramsay bounded and spied movement and plots everywhere, and scurried around desert shrub and mottled stone.

I’d driven up the morning before from home Sonoma County on a minor pilgrimage to the Great Space Center, a 450 acre ranch up the flank of the Whitney range, former residence of spiritual teacher and philosopher Franklin Merrell-Wolff, who passed in 1985. Along highway 12 gathered dark vultures around some small furry prey. One perched himself upon a post, wings spread ceremoniously north, either blessing the kill or announcing the New Avian Kingdom Come to his gathered adherents. The drive took me through Sonoma wine country, rolling soft green hills, golden yellow tinged orange wine grape vineyard leaves fluttering; around the marshy end of Vallejo San Francisco Bay, sluggish waters iron brown; straight shot onto highway 80 rumbling to hometown Sacramento and highway 50 beyond, yellow foothills to alpine forest curves up the gradual west groove of Sierra mountains, white dust snow peaks clear and cold; Echo summit and over into mysteriously quiet and poised eastern flank, wide pooling meadows and snow tinged waters; highway 395 a grand symphony of cavernous and soaring earth, the heavenly emptiness and poise of Mono lake basin, going down, down South into the valley and the arching sheer burst of mountain range this Eastern Sierra so swift and dramatic compared to gradual rolling lift of foothills into forests into mountain towns and finally snow blanketed mountains of the West rising from San Francisco’s golden shore, the wrapping, enveloping Pacific Ocean.

But into the small town of Lone Pine I drove as the sun had long sunk over the ridge line and shadows darkened the desert slope and pooled around the twinkling lights of buildings and windows. The Great Space was still three miles up into that darkness. Slow rumble up a rutted dirt road, I searched for a light, and found none. At one point I passed a tall figure in a tree shrouded driveway, and nearly blind backed up along the narrow road fenced by thick dry bush. Turns out he wasn’t the man I was looking for, Franklin’s granddaughter’s son, Robert. No, this man was standing in the darkness evidently waiting to help me, for I had gotten stuck. After he pointed up the road and mentioned where the guest cottage rested, he watched as my tires spun in the soft pillows of dust. Investigating, he noted I was stuck on a rock. He rustled around his dark dwelling, an airy cabin, and located pickaxe and shovel, and we dug in trying to free the trapped vehicle. Ramsay was whining the whole time, not understanding why, since we’d obviously arrived, she wasn’t allowed out to begin surveys of the land and assessments of security threats. The bodhisattva tried pushing, but the small car just heaved and gave up. I got down underneath and felt the rock, brushed some dirt way, and lifted the thing away. Like any good teacher, the grizzled old guy had simply pointed the way, and I freed the car myself. We finally made it to the cottage, lit the oil lanterns in the rustic two-bedroom house, and settled in with some Irish whiskey and Franklin’s first work, Pathways Through to Space.

Franklin wrote of his transcendental experience from 1936. He realized that what we in our relative consciousness normally think of as have substance, the material of our sensual world (a subjective consciousness over against the “objective world” of things, ponderable matter), is actually empty of Substance, and what we take as emptiness, darkness from the relative standpoint (that which is the empty “stuff” between a conscious subject viewpoint and the things our senses discover “out there”) is fundamentally the deeper real, fullness and light, and the core is the seat of Consciousness itself. When one searches for this self, of course one finds nothing. One is searching for an object, whether gross or subtle. A thing. So one is deluding oneself, as the fundamental source, the holy ground of consciousness, cannot be an object presented to one as subject. This is the relative field. But God is the Absolute. See the difficulty? The writing of this, of course, has no bearing on the truth of the experience conveyed. And I do it no justice. Franklin did say, however, that the Key to his Recognition came when he gave up searching for a subtle object of Liberation, which of course posits that there is something outside of the subjective pole of consciousness to “find”. There was no aim. Freedom is re-cognizing you are free. I suppose another incarnation would be “Christ is within you.” I remember having a minor recognition along these lines, one afternoon looking with great love and desire on a beautiful ocean from Land’s End in San Francisco. The light on the water, the tidal dance, the holy mist gracing the blown Cyprus trees. I suppose I desired to meld with all the beauty, which I took to be forever distant, “out there”, unreachable, and all the more desirable for that impossibility of possessing it, or being possessed by it. It then hit me: I was in that already, it was all around me, standing as I was on a bluff within this our glorious earth, and I smelled the ocean, breathed in the briny perfume. At that point desire dropped away, and only beauty remained.

What dreams spur the flight of the pilgrim? Latin peregrinus, “foreigner”, peregre, “from abroad”, per + ager fundamentally meaning “through field, country”. A pilgrim is one who wanders about, secondarily one making a journey to a shrine or holy place. Think of the peregrine falcon in flight on a hunt. The popular notion of the pilgrimage captured in the image of the hunt: craving the prey, spiritual sustenance, fair enough. What precisely does the pilgrim lack, need, or thinks he needs? In Islam the hajj is one of the religion’s five pillars; the believer should make the trek to Mecca, recreating and celebrating the hejira or “flight” Mohammed made from Mecca to Medina in 622. A more formal component of a Muslim’s spiritual duty, whole families gather at airports to welcome back the sojourner. On the sides of concrete slab houses in Aleppo, Syria, a green spray painted palm tree confirms a resident had undertaken the trip successfully. Adhering to the original notion, pilgrimages are feats of walking. Circumambulating Mount Kailas and Lake Manasarovar in Tibet; on the Camino de Santiago through Europe to the bones of Saint James. Hundreds of hikes girdle the globe, seekers on a mission shuffle thoughtfully in fog and rain and dusty sun. A further question: what is the pilgrim hoping to find at the terminus? Ah, perhaps nothing; the journey commences, endures, ends. Perhaps one prays over relics, holy bones of the saintly departed. Ironic, as the most honest prayer will be answered: yes, you too shall wind up piled bones! I felt no mystic sensation upon arrival. The wild mountainous, cavernous, rivering, meadowing, snow-feathered land was wondrous enough. So I slept.

A rutted two-wheel trail crawls up the Whitney flank toward the canyon, where that late afternoon swirls of misty cloud fog spiced in the yawning, burbled and warped the wind, beckoned to enter. Dog Ramsay and I did, hiking across the already late afternoon shadowed cool of eastern Sierra toward the ashrama built deep in the Tuttle Creek Canyon by Franklin Merrell-Wolff in the last century. A fierce slicing wind roars from the canyon’s bowels. I was Yudhisthira with his dog coming into the gates of heaven, and Indra stood her ground, throwing whorls of sand and dust down from her growling countenance. Returning down the trail, I spy a figure coming up, slowly. It was the grizzled bodhisattva who the previous evening assisted in freeing my car. We met, shook hands. Ramsay begin digging off the trail and wrestling shrubbery branches. The old guy gave me the history of the place, pointing out neighbors and their stories. He knew Franklin’s story, too. Admitted trying to read through his work, but it flummoxed him. He had respect for Franklin, considered him legitimate, but sniffed disdainfully at those he labeled Franklin’s “acolytes.” Who the grizzled bent figure really learned from was Krishnamurti. I concurred. Said he saw/heard Krishnamurti speak of few times.

“Yeah the first time I went down to that place, down there by Santa Barbara”—he waved southward, “Ojai” I said—“and the first time Krishnamurti asked me ‘Why are you here?’ and I thought, huh…so I stayed and listened to him. The next time Krishnamurti asked me the same thing, ‘Why are you here?’ I said I didn’t really know why. So then he says ‘Well then why don’t leave.’ So I did. The third time, two guys I knew wanted to see him. I'd already seen him twice--"

"Yes, like Alan Watts said: once you get the message, hang up. No use putting the phone on an alter--"

"Yeah so these guys didn't have a car. So I drove them down."

"Ah, the Buddhist ferryman making the crossing, taking folks to the other shore--"

"I knew Krishnamurti talked for 45 minutes. So I walked around [whistling as if passing time] and after 45 minutes, there they were just coming out."

After awhile he bade goodbye and started up the trail. To where I couldn’t say.

Late afternoon I got back to the cottage. Ramsay and I had done three long hikes. I’d reread many chapters of Franklin's book during the day as the sun warmed the cottage, gathered Ramsay close and tied her leash to the porch chair when I heard coyotes yelping not too far off. But now the rosy air was cooling. It was only 3:30 in the afternoon. The heater wasn’t working. Prospects were cold leftover lentil salad. What, I’d sit in this rustic cottage and drink until bed? So I packed up and we drove off. On the road again, zooming through fallen darkness to a motel in Bridgeport, three hours north. A blessed life is pilgrimage enough.