How Places Hold Memories / How Memories Hold Us
Before we humans grew restless and left our villages because of discontent? Back when we lived in the groove of generational memory? We accidentally saw the ancestors in our own occasional gestures. We heard our children rehearse incidents that our great grandmothers use to narrate and we were shocked because we had never spoken of it and then we realized that it must have been the place itself that whispered this secret memory to our children. The place just past the part of the woods we knew. That place must have been where the story happened before and was happening again. (That story was happening over and over again in that remote thicket but places have ways of keeping secrets and revealing them.)
When our ancestors were indigenous and knew how to migrate with seasons, before the earth grew gridlines and borders, highways and satellites, back then, each spring and each autumn were marked by the feeling of THE RETURN. The children experienced this as pure exploratory joy punctuated by bursts and unspoolings of rememberance. There are some games that can only be played here. Some imaginary playing that grew out of only this place and a thousand feelings that unfold once we hide beneath this ancient lilac bush, when we dare to scale this terrifying incline, when we transform these hearty dropped branches into fort walls, walking sticks, fishing rods and dueling swords.
The grown ones hear the children's laughter and shrieks and remember with fondness those times but their memories here are more complex -- colored as much by disappointments as by reliefs. Textured with betrayals and hopes, steeped in grief and loss but leavened by recoveries and warm evenings together by the fire. It was during THE RETURN that some of us started to understand memory as a unique dimension of existence.
But after the exile we all knew what it meant. Emily articulated it beautifully one evening when we took an alternate route back. We passed near her childhood home.
Sometimes I drive by the house where we used to live and I see the lights are on and people are inside. I wonder if they're as happy as I was in that house. I wonder if any of the dreams I used to have when I lived there came true for them instead?
I have lived in 15 dwellings before this one I live in now. And there are dozens of other places -- grandparent's houses, jobs, schools, churches, roads, hiking trails, sand dunes, tree forts, secret passageways and art galleries strewn with chairs and wine and conversations.
So many of these places have been amputated from my presence, my everyday life. They live on as ghost limbs, though. Sometimes they ache and other times I just try to use them because I forget that they're gone until...(nothing).
They are as persistent as sunrise (though less frequently recurring and often much more vital).
As we age, the distance of our exile from these homelands increases at precisely the same rate as our longing for them grows. The few places where we can return? These grow in sacredness.
But there is a hidden gift in exile.
It is: This place.
The place where you are right now. Smell it. Sniff again until you can smell what is unique about it. Look around. All the clutter? All the mundane ordinariness? These are the gifts of this place. The ways it does not look standard. The problems that keep it from being a magazine spread. Or even worth a photograph on instagram. The embarrassing specificity of it is exactly what makes it memorable.
That is to say, sacred.
Linger a moment and feel the small bit of home this place provides. If you listen closely - you may hear laughter or shrieks of delight. You might start to feel the story that is happening over and over in this place.
A story that is hidden from most.
Comments