Anam Cara

         There is an old shed near my house. Each April, after their long journey from Africa, the swallows return to the same nests in its rafters. They refurbish the nests and soon new little swallows will hatch out there. It is fascinating that the destination of such a huge continental journey is the fragile little grass-and-mud homes in the roof of an abandoned shed. It suggests that one can undertake any voyage if the destination is home. Humble or grand, home is where your heart belongs.

When it is a place of shelter and love, there is no place like home. It is then one of the sweetest words in any language. It suggests a nest where intimacy and belonging foster identity and individuality. In a sense, the notion of home is a continuation of the human body, which is, after all, our original and primary home on earth; it houses the mind, heart, and spirit. To be, we need to be home. When a place to belong is assured, the adventure of growth can begin with great promise.

Driving at dusk through the countryside, one sees the lights coming on in the different homes. One glimpses the bright interiors that house each family. The very ordinariness of these houses conceals the force and mystery of the events that unfold there. Very few other buildings house such transformation. A home is a subtle, implicit laboratory of spirit. It is here that human beings are made; here that their minds open to discover others and come to know who they might be themselves. It is astounding how the seminal happenings in life are mainly unconscious and implicit. Most of what happens within a home unfolds inside the ordinary narrative of the daily routine. Yet later on in life, when one looks back more closely, it is quite incredible how so many of the roots of one’s identity, experience, and presence lead back to that childhood kitchen where so much was happening unknown to itself.

The origin of the word dwell is “to dig deep.” Born into the home, the child starts from the deepest place. In the early silence of childhood, experience becomes deeply engraved. Whatever experience happens here modulates and sets the rhythm of mind and the sensitivities of the heart. If parents were aware of how much secretly depends on them, they would become paralyzed with the weight of responsibility. Home is where we start from, and it inevitably also determines how we start to be who we are. The Oxford English Dictionary states that home also means “a place where a thing flourishes or from which it originates.” In such a subtle and unseen way the home is the seedbed of individual presence.

The simple act of walking into someone’s home can be revelatory. You have stepped from the anonymity of the streets into the sudden, gathered intimacy of a private sanctuary. There is some unwarranted way in which the home displays the presences that it holds and molds. This visual is never available anywhere else. Outside the home its members become different in the various situations in which they find themselves. However, in the home the family as an intricate interweave of presences throws one another into unique relief. While this is usually subtle and can often be largely concealed, it can glimmer through in the immediacy of meeting them all together. If one could discern it, everything is there—on show. This is often the startling recognition looking back years later at family photographs. There one sees oneself as a child looking out at the camera from within your cluster of siblings, most likely innocent to all the psychological and spiritual forces that were at work.

There is nothing as un-neutral as a home. Even the most ordinary home is an implicit theater to subversive inner happenings. It is the most self-effacing laboratory of consciousness quietly shaping belief, expectation, and life direction. Parents are invisible creators. Quietly, day after day, their care and kindness nurture and foster the unseen landscapes of their children’s minds. On the life journey of each individual the nature of the mind determines what is seen and valued. In The Symposium, Plato said so beautifully that one of the highest human privileges is to “be midwife to the birth of the soul in another.” This is the precious and eternal work that parents do; they do this unobtrusively and continuously. Next to birth, bringing a child physically into the world, this is the greatest gift that one can confer on another. It is a gift that, once given, can never be taken away by anyone else, an inner gift that will inform and illuminate their journey.

There is no such thing as perfect parents. All parents make mistakes and inevitably leave lesser or greater trails of damage. In later life it is often a painful and difficult task for a person to discern and integrate what occurred in childhood; this can be slow work, but it can yield great fruits of forgiveness, freedom, and tranquillity of heart.