Rooms

“An Offering” (image I made from the side yard of my home ).

I keep remembering specific rooms in the house I lived in for 18-years. In some ways, I am still living there. I’m here, in my new home and suddenly realize that I am daydreaming, picturing myself walking from the kitchen to the hallway in a house I left nearly three months ago. Or sometimes as I look out a window here, I am remembering the view out the back side window to the woods that edged a side yard. How many images of those woods did I make across those 18 years?

The familiar is soothing. The known comforts.

I have lived in my new place since Halloween. It’s unsettling  how unfamiliar it remains. I can count on a hand the number of times I have gone downstairs to the basement. I have yet to even see the attic. It all feels temporary.

A home is a way of being in the world that is tied to the familiar. David Whyte (2015) writes that “taking a new step always leads to a kind of radical internal simplification, where, suddenly, very large parts of us, parts of us we have kept gainfully employed for years, parts of us still rehearsing the old complicated story, are suddenly out of a job.”