What is Home?
Drew, Kananaskis August 1981
What is home to me?
A discussion about the meanings of Home can easily fall into cliche, sentimentality, and sophistry; at least in the remembering both the fond memories and avoiding confrontations about more the more painful ones of a past Home. So yes, “Home is where the heart is”. Yet this begs a question, “Where is the metaphorical location, the geographical place of one’s heart when someone calls some place Home?”
In other words, what is the Geography of Home. It seems like an universal human need or longing to be part of a place one calls my Home. After all, there are present land disputes, even wars, being litigated and fought based on disputing claims about Home-land. Even those of us blessed with peaceful and undisputed claims on a place we have named “Home”, may think when visiting somewhere new, “This place reminds me of Home as it resembles and feels like home too.”
I recall taking my family to see the documentary Rivers and Tides about Andy Goldsworthy. Despite my rave review from a previous viewing, and palpable excitement to share the opportunity for us as a family to see such an inspirational landscape sculptor at work, they called it the most boring film they had ever seen. The film opens at the Bay of Fundy, Nova Scotia in early spring. Large icicles hang from rock faces, and with bare hands, Goldsworthy creates an ethereal sculpture that catches the fading light of dusk. Even Goldsworthy is surprised at this, which speaks to the serendipity of creating art, especially outside.
Goldsworthy completes his commission and returns to Penpont, Scotland. He calls Penpont his Home Place. Penpont is Andy Goldsworthy’s muse. He speaks the emotional toll absence from this landscape has on him after few weeks away from his Muse. As an artist, it’s his job to everyday venture out to discover the Muse’s changing landscape, and whether Nature will share hidden secrets, about this place yes, but also something transcendent about Life. When Goldsworthy is here, he is Home.
I recently read The North-West Is Our Mother: The Story of Louis Riel’s People, the Métis Nation by Jean Teillet. The Great Northern Plains of what is today Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and the Dakotas is the Home place of the Métis. Of course the geography of home is tied up with family, culture, shared suffering, great collective joy, and political and sometimes military battles against those who threaten the Home Place. Again, Home is invariably tied to a Geographical place, that is more than any particular rural or urban house, it’s often like the imprinting that a salmon smolt acquires early in life and returns to its Home Place to die as it fulfills its life’s purpose.
For me then, what is my Home place? I love my life here in British Columbia, close to the ones I love most. So this place feels like Home. However, like the Métis, I have deep roots to the land of my childhood, of the short grass prairie and of the majestic Rocky Mountains. The Northwest is my real Home too. It’s the place I want my ashes to be spread, hopefully by those I love, near the place in this photograph of Kananaskis. I feel this is my Omega Home.
In the movie Little Big Man (1970), there is a great and humorous scene (in all of film history, in my opinion) where the character Old Lodge Skins, played by Chief Dan George, goes to the mountain to die near my beloved Rockies. Life completes its circle, where one returns to Earth, near the place where one is most closely attached. Maybe a loved one will use Old Lodge Skins speech as part of my eulogy:
“Come out and fight! It is a good day to die! Thank You for making me a Human Being! Thank You for helpin' me to become a warrior! Thank You for my victories, and for my defeats! Thank You for my vision, and the blindness in which I saw further!”
*Old Lodge Skins: Snake Woman “Doesn’t Like Horses…”