Dear Rita,
I know that you are visiting your parents as it is permitted and ‘safe’ now in the Netherlands. It makes me realise how much I’d like to see my father (again), and have another walk with him. I quite often try to recall the memory of our last walk together on the farm so that I don’t lose it. The pace was painful; each step was a huge effort.
Can you take a walk with your father for me? It’s a chance to have another walk as a daughter.
Dear Hannah,
This morning, on the second to last day of my visit, I invited my father to go on a walk. He agreed:
For the first few metres you are walking slightly uphill on a paved road. It’s a little tiring for both of you. There is some tension, most likely because he seems to be thinking that there is something in particular you wish to discuss with him. You consider mentioning that you have no agenda other than enjoying the proximity of another walk together, but you keep quiet. As you leave the house further behind, into the fields he knows so well, onto the dirt roads, the tension dissolves and you share familiar thoughts on familiar topics, like other family members, politics and future plans. You notice how you walk with the same leg in front.
After some time (and miles), you start talking more about yourselves and inner stirrings, slowing the walking pace. There’s a question, raised by him, that you have to think about for longer. (You are now walking so slowly that you almost seem to come to a standstill.) It goes something like this:
‘Yes ok and what about your personal needs and longings, apart from the ability to attune to others?’
It moves you, the way he’s able to see – you.
Back at the house, you sit for a couple of minutes outside on a wooden bench in silence.
Resting legs, thoughts, hearts.
Dear Hannah,
I am moving between places. After having spent so much time at home in lockdown, it’s quite disruptive. I feel restless and vulnerable. I want to be able to come home and be at ease there. When I think of your place with its large wooden dining room table, the herbs growing outside the kitchen and the Persian carpet, I can imagine feeling at home there. Could you be (t)here for me?
Dear Rita,
I took some time to think about what it really means to feel ‘at home’. All the tangible things like the smell of a place, the style of the space, the way things are placed and which things you choose to place around you, but I kept returning to the feeling of being at home. As if it is a sense unto itself. The sense of feeling at home. I realised that to feel at home you must inhabit – this means you must simply spend time in the place. Lots of time. The feeling of being at home for me means that ‘you are held by a space’; it is a place where you can rest, a place where you are contained in the huge spinning of the planet and all the complexities of a wide open world. But how do you make a space do that? Well, I am not entirely sure but perhaps through the rhythms which tell the house it is holding you. Through your presence.
Over three days you choose an hour in the day and you spend time just being in the house. Some of it is spent moving things around but mostly it is a way of putting yourself into the space:
You watch the two swallows building their mud nest just underneath the roof outside the kitchen. They are making a home… for obvious practical reasons like protection from the weather they have chosen this place, but there are so many options, you watch them building and wonder why this particular place? You watch the swallows and all of the life around that seems to be making home around your home at the same time. You think about stretching this further than your home, feeling at home in this place, in this country, feeling at home in your own skin. The feeling comes and goes like waves, or seasons and maybe the feeling itself changes, or what you need in order to feel at home changes. It was initially part of growing up in a family, your parents and your family held this feeling for you- it was simply there. Wherever the family home was, that was home. Now it is up to you. You pick a very delicate white rose from my mothers’ garden and put it in a small glass vase on the dining room table.