Swimming this morning, I was thinking of Dogen, the green mountains walking. The blue mountains walking. This is my morning meditation, up and down my blue lane. In the clear water, I was swimming and thinking of houses. Last March I went to Unravel at the Barbican Centre in London, a really astonishing exhibition of textiles that were subversive and beautiful, some of them calling to images I keep in my own subconscious. (The haunting black garment woven by Magdalena Abakanowicz, for example.) When I came home, I was determined to make something myself, something that drew together strands of housebuilding, homemaking, family life, things central to the life I have lived for the past 45 years. But then for reasons I am still puzzling through and untangling, those steadfasts altered, shifted. The urgency to make a textile drifted away. It’s taken me until now to feel the draw again, in part because my sense of home has changed. My old dreams of houses and home have become something else. In the dreams I am elsewhere, trying to find shelter. Enough wood for the winter. A warm place to sleep.
Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it. For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts–serious, sad thoughts–and not to dreams. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.
–Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
This morning, swimming, I was thinking about houses. I’ve been reading some psychoanalytic literature and realize that my recurring dreams of lost homes fit into the Jungian matrix: our homes are among the oldest of our collective symbols. They are sacred ground. And what happens when the ground shifts? That’s what I’d like to find out. A textile might help me. Arranging blocks of Indian and Japanese fabric on sturdy denim, a community might emerge. Rectangles for chimneys, triangles for roofs, tiny squares for windows: a geometry of memory and hope. In the past ten years I have been reaching back, back, to the lives of family members who were born in the late 19th century and I have learned something about continuity. I thought I was also learning about myself but there are certainly gaps in the process. So maybe I will make room in this new thinking about a shelter that will hold all of us, keep us safe, settle our old differences. A door that opens inward and out. Windows that let in the light.
Moreover, my ancestors’ souls are sustained by the atmosphere of the house, since I answer for them the questions that their lives once left behind. I carve out rough answers as best I can. I have even drawn them on the walls. It is as if a silent, greater family, stretching down the centuries, were peopling the house.
–Carl Jung, “The Earth Has a Soul: the Nature Writings of C. G. Jung”
...Theresa Kishkan 