Texts for a New Time: Home
Reflections from a year between homes, and a TV show
Welcome to my final Texts for a New Time this year! Here’s where I amplify media of all kinds that’s inspiring me — books, shows, and other stuff that I believe are helping bring out the best of humanity through times of change.
Today’s Texts for a New Time is Home. Home is a marvelous series on Apple TV, which, episode-by-episode, is busting my mind open about how great visionary homes come into being, in partnership with other humans, craftspeople, and the Earth.
In this show, I’ve seen how a fashion designer conceived a bamboo castle draping about her body like a great whimsical dress (Bali). How a family layered a great lush greenhouse around their traditional log-cabin home, bringing warmth and ripe fruit into their Nordic winters (Sweden). How a couple invited the farm indoors, happy goats living on one end of a horizontal skyscraper barn, milked in the morning for evening masterclasses at a fancy-rustic-intimate cooking school (Australia).
Home has tickled my imagination and edged me deeper into asking: What activities are so deeply part of me that I need their facility embedded into my very membrane with the outside world? What could that perfect limning between inner and outer actually be shaped like? How strange — or normal — might the enchanted vessel of my Home be? Can I discern its contours in the life I’m living now, the home I’m in?
Seeking home, finding home, inventing home
What’s home for you? For me home is sugar cookies and an altered sense of time. Home is that oneiric sense of being completely out of control, but also completely in order: the order of home. The weird, five-dimensional order of home, all kookiness and elegance and Magna-tiles. Home is polyphony breaking in and out of chaos. Home is a succession of savory frictions, a great combustible of memory, a well-told story being told well one more time, and me noticing new things in it finally.
How much home can you have, how much do you need? I guess my answer to that question is “more.” More home. I seem to be on a wild quest to make everyplace into home. I can be at home at your house, or your house, or yours. This metropolis or that tiny township. This year, I have loved coming home to friends’ sweet new apartments, collaborators’ cozy New England abodes, aunts’ photo-festooned guest rooms. But am I homing in on my real home?
If only we too could find a pure, contained,
human place, our own strip of fruit-bearing soil
between river and rock.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, translated by Stephen Mitchell
I am starting to suspect that my real home is right in view but will stay invisible until some tectonic inner shift has occurred: some great shift whereby I finally I know myself as worthy of the home I dream of, and know myself as capable of partnering it. And in the meantime the process continues: contemplating utopia next door, researching grand experiments in artful coliving, getting sparked by what these bold souls are doing in Home, and seeking more honesty and bravery and technique within myself.
A midwinter wish: I hope that wherever you find yourself this week you’re having an experience of home, and that with each solstice season you might find yourself more deeply at home on the planet, including all the places where you break your bread and rest your head. Festive greetings to you and those you call family.