agatha speaks - homeless

Homeless, we are homeless….

- Paul Simon and Lady Smith Black Mombaza

We are a nation of wanderers, a culture of nomads. We build monuments to our wanderlust—millions of miles of highways, millions of vehicles.

Most of our ancestors are from some other country and even those who are native here do not live on the land of their old ones, have left themselves or were herded relentlessly by the invading hordes.

We are restless, searching.

Searching for what? For what we have lost that we don't even know we have lost. We listen to tales of others about what is important, about who God is, a knowledge that can only come from within and only if we listen, only if we stop and stay still long enough to hear.

We used to be more grounded, more connected to place. Even the nomads traveled the same routes, lands they knew better than their own faces, like migrating birds, that they could follow in their sleep. They knew the stars, the planets, the movements of the sun, the phases of the moon, the contours of the land, the flora and fauna, all, they knew it all and learned from these and were nurtured by these. Families taught the young ones, tribes, clans were connected—to each other and the land.

The land, the earth and stars were the gods, were the sacred Mother and Father, who held us in constancy, who we could trust, count on to always be there, though always changing, consistent in that change.

We are mixed together now all far from home. We fight with each other in our loss, our loneliness, our fears. We seek desperately to regain, recover, relocate what we have lost without even knowing what it is.

And in our lostness we are destroying the very one we are seeking. Our roots go back, so far back, to other places, other lands, hills and trees, rivers and lakes, and the spirits that dwelt there. We cling to gods not our own, born in lands foreign to us. We defend them fanatically, zealously in our confusion. We have lost the way, the true way, and we wander miles and miles seeking for we know not what.

My family left my birth land when I was six. I lived in that new home for twelve years, then moved at least once a year for the next ten years. I rested for six years in an unbelievably beautiful and magical place, a place that lives inside me now with startling clarity through I've been gone almost twenty years. And now I live here, in these woods, by this river and have for more than eleven years, almost a record for me.

And now this land is beginning to teach me because I'm beginning to listen, to be still long enough to catch the slow steady song of the seasons, the elements, the land itself, the ones who live here and always have, the wild ones, the sun and moon in the never-ending, always new yet always the same journeys through the Universe.

And I am beginning to see that the way is here, the path is no path, the route is stillness, the horizon within.

Be here now. We are here now, in this place, and this is our home, now, our earth and wherever we are she will care for us, in her way, will teach us if we will stop and listen.

We need to learn the spirits of this place where we are, to live in close connection to this land, nurturing and respecting it, as we desire to be nurtured and respected.

We need to know that this is the only land we have, and we need to remember to honor her.