You Can’t Go Home…?
Walking heedlessly in a dream
A cuckoo’s song summons me
I turn my head
Who has told me to return?
You must not ask me where I am going
As I wander this limitless world
Where every step I take is my home.
This is a favorite poem by Dogen (translated by a chap named Stephen Heine, with a little tweaking from me). In medieval China (and maybe in contemporary China, for all I know), the call of the cuckoo was heard as a kind of warning, to return home to where you came from or simply to turn aside from your direction, to stop whatever you are doing. Dogen hears it a little differently. But I’ll come back to the poem presently. For the moment, the question it raises for me is, Where, or what, is home?
Home is where the heart is, isn’t it? Or maybe as Zen practitioners we should say, Home is where the heart-mind is, since that would expand the field of home beyond the merely local. I was born in Ireland, but I’ve lived almost 3 times as many years in the United States, and I consider America my home. I came here to live in 1979, and my visits to Ireland grow increasingly infrequent as the years go by. And yet I cannot rid myself of the habit of referring to the old country as home. If you asked me when I last went to Ireland, I would say, I went home last year, with my daughter who had never been to Ireland and my daughter-in-law, to visit family and friends—who of course are all old and getting older. It was a special trip. We stayed with a college friend in Cork City and visited my favorite living aunt, a very active 90-year old, in Waterford, the city where I was born.
But Waterford is not the place I think of when I think of home. That place is Valentia, a small (3 by 7 mile) island off the southwest corner of the country, where I spent my summers until the age of fourteen. The island is the site of a now obsolete transatlantic cable station where my uncle used to work and, more recently, the setting of a Star Wars episode (which actually took place on the nearby Skellig rock). During last year’s visit to Valentia we met another active 90-year old, a fisherman who worked with my uncle—and I also reestablished contact with a childhood friend, truly my oldest friend, whom I haven’t seen since I was 10 and he was 12. (What a pleasure it was to discover that we still like each other!)
So I regard Valentia Island as home, or as the place I come from, my starting point, as it were, rather than Waterford City, where I was born, not just because I preferred my aunt and uncle’s household to my parents’, not just because Valentia is one of the most spectacularly beautiful places in Ireland—as a child I did not know this—but because of my experience of the island that continues to have resonance every time I return there, and even when I don’t. How to describe this experience in a way that will make it credible? The island has undergone many changes, and yet for me it remains essentially unchanged because what I am experiencing is not just the memory of the old days, but the actual sensations and feelings that came to me in childhood, which periodically return with an undiminished vividness, almost as if these returning sensations and feelings—and the time I spend on Valentia—are more real than anything else. What’s with that?!
Maybe it’s just the nostalgia that most of us feel about childhood, maybe it’s just the atavistic desire to go home again—when everyone knows that you can’t—maybe it’s a reluctance to meet the present or to contemplate a future in which my possibilities are numbered (rather than numberless). Maybe there is in my vivid experience of Valentia in later life a sort of anticipation of my encounter with the Dharma and the work of attention to which I have committed myself. I like to think this. But it is only a story, and I had better come to my dharma point. Back to Dogen…
Walking heedlessly in a dream
A cuckoo’s song summons me
I turn my head
Who has told me to return?
Sound familiar? It’s the wake-up call, the voice of the cuckoo, the voice of the turtle, which will shortly announce spring, or whatever bird happens to be singing outside my window. I am willing to heed it—I turn my head—but it seems to be an awakening to doubt. Should I turn around and go home? Where is home anyway? Where am I going?
Do not ask me where I am going
As I wander this limitless world
Where every step I take is my home.
As usual, Dogen turns things upside down. Where am I going? Don’t ask. Or rather, don’t make it a problem. I am wandering in a limitless world. There is no end, there is no separation, there is no home, no one to go there. There is only this step—and every step I take with attention—just this!—that’s my home.
I don’t live in Worcester. So it used to puzzle me when I first began to open our Worcester Zen/Boundless Way website and it said, Welcome home. But now I get it. I can’t go home again, no matter how often, or how infrequently, I visit Valentia, and at the same time—I never left the island at all. I can never leave because I’m carrying this place in my heart, in my heart-mind—and because all of time and place converges on this moment of awareness. The recurrence of the experience of being there, on Valentia—smell of turf smoke, voice of the ocean, mist on the channel—all of this is a reminder, an invitation, an opportunity to look deeply into this moment, to investigate the mystery of one life, here and in Ireland, one life and one moment, coming together as just-this, in every step I take on the Buddha Way.
Thank you,