Summer came flying into Virginia this year. Just last week, I was scraping frost off the windshield, and today they predict highs near 90, even in Charlottesville. So last evening, as we in the Commonwealth rotated away from the sun, I gave some serious thought to hanging out in the hammock or maybe paddling up Ivy Creek. But at the Nature Center not half a mile away, Rebecca Solnit was visiting from San Francisco and scheduled to read a bit from her recent work. At the last minute, I trundled up there and found myself nodding like a dashboard bobble-head as she read about houses, about public and private spaces, about desire, imagination, and the ways we get and spend.
Years ago, a provocative phrase took hold of me and keeps nagging for attention: “smaller houses, bigger homes.”
A house is the structure we own; a home is less tangible. Home is the space in which we live. And by “live,” I don’t mean simply exist but inhabit with the comfort and security that allows us to be and to grow. In a way, then, home is a feeling — of belonging and responsibility, of acceptance as we are and the support to become what we might be. I’ve not fleshed out the implications of that wee phrase, for all sorts of reasons, I guess. Meanwhile, seeds of the same idea found fertile ground and an able witness in Ms. Solnit.
Among other things, Solnit described last night our recent obsession with houses, with having and outfitting our private castles, and the problems that obsession can cause — from suburban sprawl with its environmental destructiveness, to the trend away from actual connections with strangers and acquaintances that public spaces facilitate. Some react by focusing on their individual selves, quietly trying to “do the right thing,” to minimize one’s own carbon footprint — good, as far as it goes. But that’s a problem, too, Solnit said. Real and effective change has to happen on a much larger level — local, state and national — in policies, for example, that honestly reckon with global resources and responsible ways and means of using them.
Using the language of religion, Buddhism to be precise, Ms. Solnit observed that to address the global challenges that we face (she cited specifically climate change), we need bodhisattvas not arhats. She explained that arhats strive to perfect themselves. Bodhisattvas, on the other hand, defer the enlightenment that they’ve earned in order mix and mingle in the compromised, dirty, and imperfect world to aid others until all are enlightened. Surely there’s a balance somewhere between striving to better one’s self and committing that one’s self to helping the whole. Finally, I suppose, they can’t be separated out at all.
Of course I can’t help but think about the biblical connections. I am not the first to observe a general shift in the biblical literature from community to individual salvation. In the New Testament, there is considerable emphasis on how an individual is to believe and to behave and how that affects specifically his or her future reward or punishment. The Old Testament isn’t lacking emphasis on the individual, but there’s more communal responsibility, too. And any given individual’s choices affect the group’s experience of good or ill, of reward or punishment.
I left the site of the reading under a velvety sky punctuated by stars that I could see over the field of the Ivy Creek Natural Area. It’s a public place with a complicated history of private and public, bound and free, wild and domestic. I’m still working it all out — these relationships and my place (our place?) in them — and suspect I will for the rest of my small life. Meanwhile, the great earth turns and turns round again, changing in ways predictable and not. And “meanwhile,” as poet Mary Oliver writes, “the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,/ are heading home again…”
