Relaxation.
Is the sign of being fully settled the ability to kick back and fully relax? Perhaps so. I might have said I was settled a month ago, and it was true, in that the major items needed for functioning were unpacked, that this house felt like home, that I was content. But even as I said that I wasn't fully settled. Home was not yet quite my sanctuary. We are not all seekers of sanctuary; I am sure there are those of who do not, at least overtly, see the need. But I am a homebody and always have been. I love to go, love to travel, and I love to come home. I am home.
The other night I was home, sitting in the living room, listening to Bartok string quartets and just enjoying that sense of presence and of place. I was looking at the most recent issue of American Craft magazine, which had somehow gotten shoved into a pile when it arrived. Dinner was simmering slowly on the stove. I was making an Indonesian-style curry, or at least that is how it began, with an idea, and a recipe, but it evolved to accommodate the two large squashes given to me by a friend, the contents of my 'fridge, the lack of something, the addition of something else, my mood.
I picked up my knitting. It has been a long time since I could contentedly sit and knit without fretting about other things that needed doing -- either my own always too long list of things to be accomplished or some general sense of unrest in the world. It had been a long time since I felt that sense of sanctuary, that place where I didn't need to either actively busy myself, or intentionally seek silence and meditation to find peace.
Sanctuary.
You know our sanctuaries are where we make them, where we allow them to grow. And it is often we ourselves who hinder our own ability to find peace. It is easier to blame circumstances or others or the weather, than to admit that peace is there if we will simply drop our guard, simply accept that it was here all along.
Near me, near where I at on the sofa, the music washing over me, I looked at the round painted table that had belonged to my grandmother, a table purchased when she and my grandfather lived in either Peru or Columbia, I don't actually remember which. Where the table is from is less important than the fact of its own history from making through generations of use. The table has traveled with me for years, in my mid-century modern house in Hyde Park, where it probably didn't fit, the first house in Knoxville, and now here. In fact it took a while for that table to find its own space here in this house as it is right now, to find its corner, to accumulate its pile of memories and artifacts. That table looks more comfortable than it has in years, just as I perhaps feel more comfortable than I have in years. But I don't believe I would have ever anticipated that I would create such a crowded vignette on an already busy table in an old house. I would have told you I wanted simple open spaces and minimalism. How little we know ourselves.
Yes, I'll repeat that. How little we know ourselves. I do not believe I am unique in this. We all think we know ourselves until something, and it may be something minor, uproots that sense of confidence or complacence. And we are reminded once again of how delightfully complex we humans are, how maddeningly inconsistent, of how much we coast by on surfaces and little we plumb the depths, our own or those of others.
I sit on the sofa, knitting on my lap, my grandmother's table beside me, and think we have both found our place in this moment, here in Knoxville TN. A handmade, hand-painted table from Latin America, a Kiddush cup from somewhere in the Austro-Hungarian empire, an African basket, a pot made by a native-American artist, a small sculpture given me by my daughter (heart-daughter, step-daughter, are the designations truly useful?), the artifacts of histories and families and lives well-lived. Perhaps our sanctuaries are simply where we can be ourselves, where all our bumps and lumps and out of place bits can hang out without judgement. But to remain sanctuaries they cannot become memory-chalet's, they must be open to the new, the out-of-place, the uncomfortable, because that is, indeed what it means to be a sanctuary, a place of welcome, lumps and all.
Home is my sanctuary. To remain a sanctuary it must never become a prison, a place of exclusion, a place that locks out the world. All are welcome.