Places

Last night, we had a young man who has just moved to town come by to look at our house.  Our realtor came with him, and later on his father and mother showed up to look over the potential investment.  Since we were nearing Wyatt's and Elise's bedtime, we stayed at home while this cohort objectively labeled "potential buyer" moved its way through our home, or at least this place that we have called home for two plus years.  It is a strange thing to witness those who might replace you:  acknowledging that someone else will inhabit the space you've filled.

After the potential buyers had toured the home, and after we hoped that they were seeing potentials and not liabilities ... Anna called her family to discuss - largely - the hope of living into a new place.  There is the possibility now that Anna's family will procure another 27 acres of land to the east of their current property, and on those acres is a house that is not much too look at, but that may also be the beginning "place" of a family dream for her and I ... to live nearer the earth, to be bound and held more by the land.

Earlier in the day, I went to lunch with a friend I've been blessed with here in Owensboro, and I excitedly told him all about the prospects of this potential property.  He could sympathize with my excitement.  For the great majority of his adulthood, he has set himself the task of developing some land (not cruelly but carefully) away from his more urban space.  In fact, he now has a wonderful, rustic, yet modern cabin out on this land, and it could very well house he and his wife.  The question for him, though, is whether he is ready to be housed by this place.

Moving out of your current location to a new location always involves a type of dying, a conversion.  For this gentlemen that I had lunch with, the conversion involves not only a change of place, but also of pace - of learning to let go of the ability to access most things within minutes.  He would be moving to the country, and thereby would be learning how to live more in the rhythms of sunrise and sunset than minutes and hours.  He would be limited in his ability to hear from the outside world, which - while initially beautiful - is easier imagined than experienced.  No high-speed internet, no Target five minutes away, no coffee shops, no bumping into friends and strangers many times a day.  But, the possibilities are as advantageous as the losses are hard:  being held by a wide-embrace of tree and forest, creation at play in everyday, the ability to do some work that would never, ever change the land in dramatic ways, but would change my friend significantly.

As my friend drove me back to the church for the remainder of my "office" day, we got to talking about Wendell Berry.  My friend had the occasion to hear Mr. Berry speak once, and at the end of his lecture, someone asked him, "Mr. Berry, how do you actually begin living locally after you've lived in so many different places and in such contrast to the local lifestyle?"  My friend said that Wendell Berry minced no words, but said simply, "you just stop."

You stop.  You die.  You let yourself be consumed by a place.  Rather than trying to squeeze your own existence and happiness out of your community, you let yourself come to a place where you demand nothing of it and let it demand of you instead.

In the two plus years we've been in Owensboro, I have made the mistake of not "stopping" in this place.  I would like to say that I intended to be here long-term, but I know that is not true.  There has always been the subtle, but nonetheless imposing reality that this would not be my home.  No matter how much I try to deny that, it is like a bur in a saddle; it has kept me restless and never fully capable of being entirely in community.

So, in a few weeks, I will set out again.  This time for a new place, although it be something of an old home.  I hope - for once in my life - I can begin to let myself die somewhere.  I hope I can come to discover that I am housed in a place.  

Wes

p.s. - a few curiosities:  The land that you can see at the top of the blog ... that is land not too far away from the potential property we might get to live into.  And, irony of ironies, the potential buyer who walked through our home last night:  the very nephew of the friend I had lunch with that day.