How do you even begin to answer that question when you meet someone for the first time? Your place of birth, where you were raised, the city where you first moved out on your own? I usually dribble it all out, then return the favor, How 'bout you?

If time tells, I suppose I call this mountain suburb home. It’s the longest I’ve stayed anywhere—long enough to form some habits. Every morning, I sit on my porch—barely wide enough for a chair, my feet edging the bricks, feeling for balance—as I drink coffee, meditate, and read. These days I’m reading Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane.

To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience.

I want to believe him, but how can I choose? I’d have to start by identifying all the fields, studying their qualities, deciding which would best suit my needs—what makes for a good field, anyway? I could spend a lifetime just looking for a field.

The view from my porch is mostly trees that I’ve neglected to limb in an effort to avoid direct visual contact with my neighbors. I’ve left it that way so my mind can wander without distraction. But there’s one thing those trees can’t cover—something that grounds my wandering thoughts each morning—a bright yellow sign, NO OUTLET. Its bold letters scream at me, bordered in a stark yellow, marking the cul-de-sac just beyond, as if to repeat itself in case I missed it.

NO OUTLET

That one phrase somehow carries both my deepest longings and my deepest fears—to find the place where I belong, and to let go of every other place.

Home has eluded me most of my life. I’ve moved from town to town, never quite sure of where I’m from. In many ways, home has become an idea of a place, rather than a place. With so many fields out there, how do we ever choose? Can we?

Perhaps one day, in all our wanderings, we slip past the warning sign and find ourselves smack-dab in the middle of a cul-de-sac with no outlet. And after staying long enough, it becomes a little harder to imagine leaving. Maybe one day we’ve settled down enough to realize this field is just as good as any other. So we stop looking for another—and start living in ours. We begin to see that this field, with all its apparent shortcomings, has a certain depth and meaning far beyond its measurables. There’s a lifetime’s experience right here, now, in this field.

So, where are you from?

Maybe where we’re from is actually where we are, maybe it’s just as good as anywhere else, and maybe it needs no outlet to find.

It’s a simple place to live, the kind of place slow enough to notice little things.

In the evenings, I walk with my family along Middle Creek and measure our pace against the feeder streams that cross our path on their way to the creek. We’ve named each stream after our three children in order of age—Thom Creek, Margot Creek, Waverly Creek—each child a little older, each creek a little further from home. At each one, we stop and reflect before we pass. We call it by its name and observe its measurables. Full of water or empty? Have the rocks along its foundation shifted? Have any creatures taken refuge along the banks? After heavy rains, we drop leaves and small branches upstream and race across the road to find them again, as if to ensure nothing is blocking the flow.

One thing is for certain—each time we pass, the creeks are never the same.

Each time we reflect, we see a change, some shift in the stones or subtle adjustment to the flow. Sometimes our leaves don’t make it through to the other side, and we search for whatever might be blocking the flow. Other times, the creeks are bone dry, no water at all.

Whatever gives life to the creeks has its origin outside of us. As the storms come and go, the creeks rise and fall, and we do the only thing we can—we keep watching, observing, searching for subtle shifts in its composition. We admire any changes we see, acknowledge how the creek has grown, plead for rains to fill it up. We search for whatever might restrain the flow.

The creek will flow long after the task of observation has passed along to someone else—but while it belongs to us, we will continue to call it by its name, notice it, and give it time to speak.

As you turn a gem1 in your hand, the light bends through the body of the stone, and transforms the room; nothing changes, everything changes, with the subtle shift of the hand. You can turn a lot of things, a body of text, a landform, a memory. This ancient contemplative practice is a way of finding new meaning in the same form.

While preparing for my trip to the UK, I found a photograph of these waves of land2, rippling ridges that seemed to conceal a deeper current beneath their meadowy surface. I felt that by treading over these waves, I might uncover a force strong enough to pull me under, to drown me in some sacred truth. I went looking for it.

Our ancestors dug ditches and piled up berms in circular forms3 as a way of marking off space in a seemingly boundless landscape. There are two ways to build this landform, and they are essentially the same. You can dig the ditch on the inside or, you guessed it, the outside. So, the side you’re standing on is the only real difference.

For thousands of years our ancestors held communal gatherings and sacred ceremonies on the low side of the ditch; it was like a stage in the round, made to bring us together, made for communion.

The tide turned in the Iron age4; conflict surged, fear reshaped the culture, and we discovered a new meaning for the high side of the ditch, defense. Like waves crashing on the shore, these land forms created a rip current, pulling us away from each other. The waves hadn’t changed, the undercurrents had.

I was looking for cute sheep, families picnicking in breezy wildflower meadows, sun-drenched revelations.

What I found was a haze of spitting rain, wind ripping through the hills, sheep shit everywhere.

There was nothing sacred in this land. It was clearly designed for war; it wreaked of death like weeds thrown up along the shore. A fog of fear choking any hope of revelation from the land. It was quietly devasting.

I tread the ridgeline, wind frothing at my ears, drowning my thoughts before they could surface.

I tread the valley, dead silent, spirits lapping at me from the weeds as trespassed over their graves.

As I was tossed in these waves, I became increasingly disoriented, resigned to abandon my hope of revelation; and in a final stroke, I turned to face the land, to let it swallow me whole and take me under.

The land flattened before me. The floor beneath, the sky above, all held together in a single composition. Everything I could see, near and far, inside and out, us and them, was foreshortened, dissolved in a single swatch of color; all the disparate parts brought together again as one.

This ditch held two meanings, communion and separation. I came looking for the one that wasn’t there and somehow found what I was after; something sacred, a communion.

Multitudes of meaning can surface in a single form. There are two sides of a ditch, after all. Sometimes, if we’re still, a subtle shift of perspective, or a turn of the gem, can reveal the meaning we’ve lost or longed for, the meaning that was always there, just below the surface, waiting to be re-membered to its form5.

As we passed through the main entry and wandered through the garden, the moment (pictured above) broke my steady pace, like a run-on sentence you have to re-read. All the parts of the home seemed to shuffle and collapse into each other at this precise moment in its unfolding story. The gently sloping rooflines pulled me toward the center, where I noticed the door should probably have gone (because you typically cover the door for those moments when you’re caught in the rain), but the gall of this window.

The door is for doing, the window for being…

For this window to take over the plot line, pushing the door ever so slightly off the page (and not quite far enough, in my opinion) was certainly brash. I can’t imagine how many poor souls stood out in the rain while they fumbled for the key due to the self-centered act of this window. And maybe the door should have stood up for itself a little more, explained the problem to the window, or at least moved just a little more so the wall above could find its way to the ground below.

But instead of resolving this through a little negotiation, and simple clarity of thought, this run-on sentence of an elevation4 was left to be, and honestly, I think we’re better for it.

A little disruption from the steady pace of life might be exactly what we need

This home was made for the British Horticulturalist and Garden Designer Gertrude Jekyll5, who was no doubt running back and forth between the garden and the home every day, crafting the beautifully lush gardens that, at times, overgrow the home. And in the midst of doing all of her gardening, I imagine she could have quite easily lost her sense of being in the garden.

The door and the window serve different needs. The door is for doing, the window for being6 and noticing; for seeing the garden from the home, and the home from the garden. Letting the window take the center is a reminder for Gertrude and us to stop and look, to take a moment to notice the garden, to simply enjoy the experience of being.

Maybe getting stuck outside in the rain is precisely the point. A little disruption from the steady pace of life, the comings and the goings, might be exactly what we need to remember why we’re here. We are human beings, after all.