“The ache for home lives in all of us. ”
I write to you from the first home I have ever owned. The Zen Master and I bought a little condo in a historic building here in Saint Paul - the picture above is our reading nook, which is my favorite room in the place. You can't see it, but there's a gorgeous working fireplace and a window that overlooks our covered balcony, tree-lined street, and the fancy houses across from us. We've named one The Witch House because it looks like it came straight from the New Orleans Garden District on Halloween night. Delicious!
We've been moving in over the past few weeks. It's been a big change on so many levels, and Hale House has had a ripple effect on everything from my writing to my coaching to adjusting to being an "owner" after a lifetime of renting. (The condo is named after Nathan Hale, the revolutionary who famously bemoaned the fact he had but one life to give for his country, thus: Hale House).
I have pretty complicated feelings about owning a house or land, especially on stolen native territory. In fact, years ago I bought a notebook to write down research about home ownership and the first quote in it was this one from D.H. Lawrence:
"It is a dragon that has devoured us all: these obscene scaly houses, this insatiable struggle and desire to possess to possess always and in spite of everything, this need to be an owner, less one be owned."
If that doesn't give you an indication of the inner conflict I've felt around owning, I don't know what will! It's not that I judged others for owning - I simply saw how much suffering it seemed to bring so many people. The agony of the broken boiler, the roof that needs fixing, the foreclosures, the ups and downs of the market. The needling desire to always be improving. Backsplash! We MUST have backsplash! All those HGTV shows gave me the wiggins - what would this look to people living in slums, to refugees, to the homeless vet on the corner?
And yet, I kept finding myself wanting that solidity of a place being MINE, the security of a life without landlord: even though I know all is impermanent, even though I know it's turtles all the way down. My vagabond ways became less fulfilling. Yes, there is much more world to see, but having a place to come home to that wraps around you like a soft blanket - that's pretty nice, too. It's hard to have both.
There has always been this feeling of solidarity among those of us who rent, and so a part of me felt like a traitor, deciding to own. In the US, there is a real vibe of second-class citizenship if you don't own. Assumptions can often be made about renters. I always prided myself on not owning, on being divergent and a wee bit socialist. But I also worried others may think things about my bank account or my financial maturity or any number of silly things. Who cares?! But it's hard to be the square peg in the round hole all the time. Sometimes you want those edges softened a bit. Still, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was another one biting the dust, that I'd been suckered in by the American Dream and capitalism and fear.
Most of all, I was afraid of the home owning me, not the other way around.
As artists, we answer a call to live a different life than others.
If we want to make good work, we have to be bad consumers - shopping less, writing more. We have to be middling housekeepers - yes, a clean house is nice, but so is finishing a chapter. We can't keep up with the Joneses because if we spend our whole weekends tinkering on our houses, we'll never get that book deal.
On call after call with my writers, I'd hear how their home improvement or buying or selling was taking over their lives, eating up all their writing time, stressing them out financially (see: eating up their writing time). I was terrified of that happening to me.
Since COVID, though, I have felt a need for deeper roots. During quarantine, we lived in a home we were renting and I kept worrying the couple would decide to move back in. We've had the same terrible landlord stories so many renters regale their friends with. We've put blood and sweat into being good stewards of the apartments and homes we've lived in, knowing it wasn't for keeps: a good practice in impermanence every time we've moved. I'm a bit sad wondering if the wild flowers I planted in our rented Victorian last year are going to bloom. And not a little annoyed by cheap landlord tricks surrounding security deposits. (I won't miss THAT).
In Raynor Winn's memoir The Salt Path, she writes about the beautiful farm she and her husband owned in Wales, how it was taken away, their subsequent homelessness amidst his terminal diagnosis, and their solution: walking Britain's coastal path instead of enduring the misery of trying to get into a British estate or dealing with grudging friends who only wanted to offer a couch for a few days, tops. The walk revealed their fellow humans' profound distaste for the unhoused and gave Winn and her husband a deeper sense of what "home" really is--each other, of course. And yet: they still wanted a home. A place that was theirs. A true shelter from the storm of life. They could hold all of the complexity as they walked - the letting go, the clinging, the letting go, the letting go, the letting go: of what they had, of their fear, of their assumptions.
This story worked on me more than I'd realized as I began to see how maybe it was okay to want to have something of your own, especially when you want EVERYONE to be able to have that, too. Housing equity. What a thought. She says:
"How can there be so few individuals who understand the need for people to have a space of their own?"
Here, she's speaking about how many owners tend to look down on the unhoused or renters, safe in the belief that they have earned their home, that it is their right and due, and - now that they have one - they must protect it at all costs. Keep out the riff-raff. Call the police if a Black man is walking up a driveway. To be a white person owning a home in the United States is a fraught affair when you've chosen to open your eyes to these things. And I echo Winn: Everyone needs a space of their own. Everyone deserves that. My guilt is useless, but my holy fury that we actually COULD house everyone and choose not to is very useful, indeed.
The place we bought is a gorgeous unit in a 16-unit building that is over 100 years old and I love it. But I feel WEIRD about it, too. We only moved five minutes away from our rental, but instead of the diversity of my old neighborhood, I see lots of white people walking beautifully groomed dogs. There are many nice cars. On the day my dear friend, a person of color, came to see us last week, there were literally people dressed up in Gatsby-era costumes playing croquet - CROQUET! - on the green beside our building. It was like a bonus scene from Get Out. I felt ashamed. But they're a Zen priest and gently reminded me that it's okay to have a beautiful, safe refuge to retreat to where you fill your well so you can go out and do good work in the world. Gotta love Zen priests.
So I took THAT weird feeling and mused on it a bit. What did it mean for me to live in a neighborhood like this? What did it say about me and my values? We were only able to get this place because of inter-generational wealth: my husband's parents gave us the down payment. What a beautiful thing to do - and what an example of why certain people are able to have stability and choice in this country, while so many are do not have the option to own a home or live in a good neighborhood (or go to college, or, or, or).
Part of why we chose a condo over a home was so that it wouldn't own us, wouldn't take up all our time in maintenance, and because we wanted to live in community - to have our fate linked with others'. Here, people garden together, do little tasks around the space, help each other out. There is a real feeling of mutual aid, in large part because all of us own 1/16th of this building. The value of our space is tied to the value of each other space in the building, so we have to work together - meetings and check-ins and the like. It's hard, actually, to live in community, but down-sizing and not owning a whole big house when we're just two people and a cat felt like that aligned with our values. (Full transparency: I dream of buying a small cabin up North, so when I talk about down-sizing, this is very relative).
We'd chosen this place for its beauty - because we're artists and it nourishes us and our work in undeniable ways.
John Muir once said that "Everyone needs beauty as well as bread."
I quite agree with that. I've been reading about neuroarts - more on that soon, but it's basically the science of how art has healing properties - and it's gotten me thinking more and more about how VITAL it is to surround ourselves with beauty and nature for our well-being as writers and also for the work itself. Making our homes places of delight and wonder is part of that, too. In tending to this aspect of ourselves, we're becoming better stewards for our books.
When you write a book and put it into the world, you no longer own it. In fact, you never did. You have only ever been the steward of your work.
After a book is shared, it becomes something different for every person who opens it. All you can do is be a good steward when its yours alone. Then you have to let it go. You can't take it with you. Just like everything in your life, it is impermanent. You will lose it. Just like you will lose your life. It's the way of things. It's okay that this is the way of things. Without the tension of loss, we would be unable to appreciate whatever we have right now.
Perhaps I came to a place where I could own a home because I've spent years loosening my grip on my work and career and focusing more on being a good steward to the work and the worker (me).
I can't control the outcome: if it sells, who will read it, any of that. All I can control is how I show up for my writing. That's it. Someone will buy it - own the rights! - or they will not.
Many people have lived in this home before me. And more will live here after me. I don't own it any more than I own my cat or the sky or the air I breathe. I am simply its steward. To believe otherwise would be to tell myself a story about immortality, about surety, about there being solid ground beneath my feet. If the years since the pandemic has taught us anything it's that the only things we can depend on are not material: love, hope, courage.
I wanted to write this out for myself and all of you because I think that one of the biggest obstacles to being a good writer and to doing right by the miracle is believing that these things - houses, degrees, vacations, new shoes, whatever - will somehow eliminate the discomfort we feel in our human skins.
But being uncomfortable is good for art. I'm glad that, while I rest easy in this home, my comfort and delight here is a reminder that so many do not have this. I think about what it would feel like to have a Russian missile hit this home. I think about all the migrants on the border right now. I think about the refugees in Greece and all over the world.
And this leads me to the quote at the top of this missive from Maya Angelou, about the ache of home living in all of us.
Isn't that why we read, why we write? It's that ache for a safe landing, for a refuge, for a place where we belong. You can't buy or own it, but you can carry it with you and pass it along to the next person who needs shelter.
For the Journalers
What does the word "home" mean to you? Time yourself for two minutes and write words, images, and various snippets of thought that come to mind.
What book is a home to you?
What piece of your own writing feels like home?
How does owning - a home, material things - support or hinder your creative spirit, your writing practice, your inner expansiveness
What would a mindset of "stewardship" over "ownership" look like for you, in both writing and life?
What are you uncomfortable about right now with this whole topic? Why?
For Circe, home will always be where the warm laundry is, a cozy lap to sit in, her favorite blanket. She's been a champ adjusting to the new space and the place didn't feel like home until she herself was in it. It's nice to know there are creatures on this planet who make their home based on simply being with their people and having a few cozy spots to curl up in safely and a good perch from which to observe the world.
Wherever you are, I hope you feel a sense of home in and out of the writer's seat -
