Dwellings of a Lifetime

“It’s a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realized what’s changed is you.”                            -F. Scott Fitzgerald

As days turn into months and thus years, our homes become more of a family member and not just shelter from life’s storms. Knowledge of our daily routines and habits are embraced. I know that as the sun rises through the Pine and Oak trees of the backyard, with luminous rays falling down as filtered cylinders of warmth, there is a certain spot where Zack the Golden Retriever, and myself will stop as though we are at attention before God and heaven smiling down at us. I have a Lakota prayer I recite at these moments; “I step into the day, I step into myself, I step into the mystery.” This simple prayer speaks to me of the relationship of learning and teaching all things on this earth. Now did Zack show me this spot or did I show him? Or did this house point us in that direction? In the end, it doesn’t matter. The ritual is established.

I also know where the warmest and coldest spots in the house are. How to best let a draft in for the fire in the hearth to take hold, and which boards in the rafters creek as though they are singing to me. These and other such qualities increasingly evolve into a dance between all of our strengths, all of our imperfections and the importance of accepting both.

Moving can illuminate and reconstruct the past, your past as it intermingles with your home. The walls, painted or papered are recollections of all that went before. Sights, sounds, and smells are a mirror of all that will come to be. Such are memories that can’t talk but there is no need, for one senses these revelations as well as yearnings. This is the soul of the house and it melds with our soul. Death and rebirth occur all within the shadow of a memory. To listen is to learn to build the dwelling of a life.

And the yearnings brought about by change, constantly improving on the blueprints only to know that perfection is always fleeting, that it’s the path that is the adventure. Subtle changes; one shade of color here, another tinge there… small, unobserved nuances that makeup moments in a day as beads on a rosary. Then in one instant, change suddenly turns you completely around. Overnight on the surface but in reality one that has taken many situations culminating together in time and space for change seems to come as a thief in the night to take away all that we thought we were and to bring to our ‘house’ all we could hope to be.

It is desire that fuels change, acted out in moderation all the soul expects and needs for this go round. We act on these impulses as we shuffle through the many rooms and closets of our lives as guided by the soul, to the stillness of our being. The path to our bliss is the consummate art of living.                 

©jc2018-9

*Portrait courtesy of Pixabay