BETWEEN STEPS
ON HOME, ROOTS AND COMMUNITY
What is home? This is a question that recurs for me. For several years I have not lived anywhere that felt permanent. I have not lived in one place for more than a year in the last five years, and often I have stayed in places for days and weeks rather than months. I am writing this now in the vacant apartment of friends. I have been here two weeks, and will leave in a few days to live for three weeks in another apartment in another city, in another country.
Home is a concept I have a very loose grasp of. So loose it would more accurate to say I have no grasp at all. Homes come and go. I welcome each one, and let go of each.
I have heard it said that the feeling of being at home, of being in the one place that provides enduring security and stability, is particularly relevant for children, and that adults have less need for this. The photographer Diane Arbus said, “The farther afield you go, the more you are going home”.
I read something recently about rootedness. The writer said, “I am the land I live on”. For me, making a statement like that is an expression of the limit of one’s knowledge of oneself. Perhaps I misunderstood. I would like to explore this subject, to unpack my thoughts and feelings about place and displacement, about what it means to put out roots.
I have heard a fair few sentiments expressed recently about the need to be rooted in place. These statements are a reaction I think to the seeming disconnection and confusion of contemporary life.
I agree that rootedness is important. What is community? What is it to belong? What are the roots that sustain me?
Roots are always in a state of longing, trying to reach beyond themselves. The roots of a tree typically head off in different directions from each other. A tree doesn’t send its roots down bunched together or running closely in parallel. The opposite is true. The more widespread the roots, and the further they reach, the more life can be sustained above ground.
In this analogy, the most vigorously alive (and interesting) people will likely have the most widespread variant roots. And since humans are mobile, physically and mentally, our roots are not limited to the particular patch of earth delineated by our physical shadow.
Community can mean many different things. A prison is a community. Village life is, or certainly was, generally more communal than city life. There are communities (and small villages are an example) in which everyone knows, and judges, everyone else’s behaviour. Many communities define themselves as much or more by who is excluded than by who is included. Communities can be entities from which exclusion, more or less arbitrarily decided, means death, or severe suffering for the excluded. There have been many communities in which, to stay and reap the benefits of community life the individual may have to subjugate their true self, desires, hopes, interests, and all expression of these. The benefits of being in a community are real too of course, and can mean the difference between life and death, relative contentment and abject misery. These benefits might be summed up as mutual aid (emotional, physical and financial) and easy access to a social network.
The sense of belonging, and the longing to belong, seem pretty universal among humans.
The prefix be- has a few different uses in English. Often it is an intensifier, and means to turn into, or to become. For example, bewitched, bedazzled, and bemused. It can also mean to go along with. So, to belong to a person, group, community or place, means to go along with those. Interestingly, to go along with seems to suggest movement. To go from here to somewhere with. From the present to the future. From the known to the unknown. To belong also has the meaning to be owned.
Is it better to have a choice about which individuals, groups, communities to belong to, to go along with, to be owned by, or not to have a choice? Historically, choices were often very limited, even non-existent.
People often say they belong to their family, or to a particular place, a religion, a country, a nation state, a culture, a language, an ethnic group, the human race. My contention is that whenever we identify ourselves with any of these, even the human race, we impose a limit on ourselves. We say, “I am this and not that”. This would be fine if we made these claims with a full and sure knowledge of what and who this “I” is. But this is not the case. We do not have that knowledge. We haven’t got to the bottom, or top, of what it is to be. Not even close. Similarly, identifying ourselves with our work, relationship status, financial situation, gender, beliefs, intellectual interests, or personality, that is, saying “this is me”, is to impose arbitrary and pretend limits on one’s self, unless and until we are in full knowledge of what and who is this “I” at the centre of our life.
So, back to rootedness. In a strong wind a tree would fall over without roots. Roots provide security in a storm, as well as everyday sustenance. When people talk of the need for rootedness they are referring to both these properties I think. To be rooted means to belong. To know and be known. To see and be seen. If there is a crisis or catastrophe, these relationships might make all the difference.
The need for everyday sustenance, the need to take in nourishment to maintain our life, is the other purpose of rootedness. A lot hinges on what this word life means for us. If life is a continual process of becoming more of ourselves and an ongoing exploration of what it is to be “me”, then the maintenance of this life and the kinds of sustenance required will be different to those needed if life means simply staying alive. The nature and extent of the root systems will be very different in those two scenarios. And the mediums in which the roots grow will also be radically different.
The ideal for me is to have a sense of being rooted and that my roots enjoy full freedom of movement.
To be fixed in place, to have a fixed location, to settle, and be settled, is an understandable desire. But the sense of being anchored in a location which is itself anchored is only possible when we have limited perception. You can pick up an ant in a bucket of soil, carry it five metres or 100, or ten miles, and the ant will know nothing of its displacement. The soil around it in the bucket is the same.
Every physical location is in continual flux. Nothing is fixed. Rivers change course, seas rise and fall, continents float and bump against each other, the earth is never in the same location twice, the sun neither, the galaxies neither. Everything is in constant motion, constant change. The ant knows nothing about this. Perhaps it is better not to know.
While clinging to the land under my feet is it better to know I will inevitably lose my grip, or not to know? Similarly, is it better to know that my personality, my egoic self, is a temporary social construct, or better to hang on tight to the illusion of its substantiality and authenticity?
The solution to this is in the answer to the question, “who am I, really?”. To answer this question requires a journey, a pilgrimage. Not a physical voyage necessarily, but a voyage nonetheless. It is my experience, shared by many others, that the self is illusory; that this small temporal self is merely a tool for surviving in this life. Above and beyond the self, is the Self.
“Lift up the self by the Self And don’t let the self droop down, For the Self is the self’s only friend And the self is the Self’s only foe.” Bhagavad Gita 6:5
The butterfly knows the caterpillar, but the caterpillar does not know the butterfly.
Personality is our interface with the world. Is it possible to fully live my personality and to not identify with it at the same time? Or does the practice of undoing knots of identification, of detachment, engender a loosening of constraints on how I encounter the world?
My sense is that it is possible to cultivate and express freedom of movement; to no longer belong to opinions and habits; to revise and rewrite stories about self and the world; to gain flexibility, better to survive and thrive in a changing and indeterminate environment, while remaining engaged with the life around me.
I'm just riffing here, but I don't know that setting up a small community where one can exercise much needed control and create better conditions for fulfilling potential is not a gated community like, say, a buddhist retreat. Us here, the rest of the world over there. If you talk about putting up walls to protect ourselves, that sounds exactly like what you hope to do. Though of course its different, in that the conditions within your walls are, hopefully, likely to be far more fruitful and fulfilling. When a protective wall morphs into a prison, it is indeed time to get out, out into the world.
I enjoyed reading this and it gave me some food for thought. I wondered about the relationship between becoming rooted somewhere and ownership. No-one talks about putting down roots somewhere and then rents for 20 years. Though of course you can spend a lifetime in a council house and feel very strongly that you have roots in the area, which suggests that ownership has very little to do with it.
People seem more important than place when we talk about roots and community. We've lived in one place for 15 years and brought 3 kids up here, but neither of us would say we had any sort of roots here. The community aspect, in spite of our best efforts, has not really materialised. When our last child has fledged we will in all likelihood take off.
The roots analogy is interesting. I suppose, scientifically speaking, that a plant's root system is so widespread and complex so as to maximise the amount of nutrients that can be obtained from the soil. In the same way, the more we travel from place to place, the more complex our own root systems become and the more nourishment we get.
A lot of people with strong roots to a place/community may possibly "not know any different". That's a negative outcome to me, but I'm outside looking in. If I was inside, it would be my universe and quite adequate.
I don't personally feel that I have any roots as such. I have a long list of travel and location "credits" right up until 2005. And actually, with age, a lot of my yearnings have subsided. So I am here, rootless, without full community, but quite content and with quite enough to be getting on with.