MIRACLE ESSAYS #3
Homeless
by
D. Patrick Miller
Published by D. Patrick Miller at Smashwords
© 2010 by D. Patrick Miller
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Originally published in THE SUN, September 1989 and excerpted in the anthology Where the Heart is: A Celebration of Home (Wildcat Canyon Press, 1995). See end of article for an update and more information about A Course in Miracles.
I will be still an instant and go home.
This world you seem to live in is not home to you. And somewhere in your mind you know that this is true. A memory of home keeps haunting you, as if there were a place that called you to return, although you do not recognize the voice, nor what it is the voice reminds you of. Yet still you feel an alien here, from somewhere all unknown…. No one but knows whereof we speak. Yet some try to put by their suffering in games they play to occupy their time, and keep their sadness from them. Others will deny that they are sad, and do not recognize their tears at all…. Yet who, in simple honesty, without defensiveness and self-deception, would deny he understands the words we speak?
--Workbook Lesson 182, A COURSE IN MIRACLES
I COME TO this essay as a sort of benediction for a part of my life just passed: thirteen years in my second home, a place that grew so comfortable that I could not imagine ever leaving. When I tried to explain my none-too-rational motivations for departing, a friend remarked, “Sometimes God shows the way by closing doors instead of opening them.”
This became a memorable metaphor for my process of change: all the doors behind and to either side of me had slammed shut during the last two years. Ahead, I could see or sense only one at a time, silently swinging open to reveal at least enough light to be worth following. Americans are supposed to move because they’re following opportunity; I was moving because of an inner voice saying simply, “Go now,” and offering no explanation or financial aid. This is where what Joseph Campbell calls “following your bliss” will get you: deep into the territory of uncertainty.
To be honest, I’d done such a thing before, when I left my native home in North Carolina at age 22 to bicycle out west and discover the dreamland of sunlight and tolerance, California. I had much less an idea of where I was going than I did this time; all I knew was that I had to get out of the South, and California was as far as one could go while staying on the American mainland. Because we had friends in Los Angeles, my partner and I settled on southern California as our destination, but somewhere in the middle of our trek we rerouted to the San Francisco Bay area, which became my second home. Now at age 35, I’ve arrived at my long-forgotten goal, two hours south of Los Angeles in a town of surfers and meditators – blessed by a paradisiacal Mediterranean climate – called Encinitas. (The Spanish word means “little live oaks.”) In my best state of mind, I know exactly why I am here: to write more, to meditate more, to let emerge from myself a new potential that has been frustrated by habits and attitudes accumulated in Berkeley.
In another state of mind, I dream that I have a brother who looks very much like me. (In actuality, my would-have-been brother was miscarried by my mother after an auto accident.) He is savagely attacking me and my sister. I resist him gently as long as I can, but it becomes apparent that he intends to do us real harm. I grab a kitchen knife and sink it into the underside of his forearm, sickened by the feel of the blade lodging in his flesh. He stops his attack, and stares at his arm with a schizophrenic half-smile. I begin to apologize: “I’m so sorry, I didn’t know else to do to stop you.” He strangely replies, “It’s OK. Actually, it feels pretty good.”
Awakened by this dream a few days after I unpacked in Encinitas, I reflected on the tendency of the unconscious to exaggerate feelings that are suppressed in waking life. It was not too long before I grasped what I’d been ignoring, perhaps out of sheer necessity, while in my adventurous and super-efficient moving state of mind: this hurts, AND it feels pretty good. A week earlier, I had wept intermittently for the first two hours of piloting a rented truck away from Berkeley; then I had abruptly shifted into an “on the road” buoyancy. Sadness and elation had continued to alternate, but the dream called my attention to the mysterious necessity to merge them, however contradictory they seemed. This, AND that, together; my “brother” could feel it. He was wounded, but the wound had abruptly cured a very bad attitude.
This is the shock of growth; in plants, it is called root shock, when a young flower or sapling must adjust to new soil because it has outgrown its first potting. It is also the shock of homelessness, when one must leave the old for the new. And without a doubt, it is the feeling of the birth trauma, when the body leaves the womb to become an independent, lonely being. This, and that: the pain and the glory of self-awareness. But virtually all spiritual traditions suggest that humanity suffers from an even greater leave-taking: our departure from the Kingdom of God, wherever that is, and whatever it might mean.