A Q & A with Barbara Gates on
Already Home: A
Topography of Spirit and Place
1) At this time of world-wide
insecurity when many people feel isolated and alienated, you’ve written
a book about finding home right where we are. How is this timely
and useful?
Already Home tells a story of neighborliness, about finding connection
-- with one’s family, oneself, and the folks next door, with whatever
presents itself, no matter how off-putting or surprising. I find
connection with a homeless woman who sleeps in our family car, a rat in
our refrigerator, the bay, trees and streets, and, learning the vast
history of my home place, with generations of neighborhood ancestors.
In contrast to our global ethic of opposition and reprisal, Already
Home offers a much-needed taste of underlying commonality grounded in a
sense of home, always available right here and now.
2) You have worked for years with
Buddhist teachers as an editor and an interviewer. How has this
informed your book?
As a freelance editor and also as co-editor of the Buddhist journal
Inquiring Mind, I have interviewed and edited the words of teachers
from all the Buddhist traditions, including Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat
Hanh, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and Burmese Abbot U Pandita Sayadaw.
What I gleaned from them, and from my twenty-eight years of meditation
practice, form the lens through which I perceive my neighborhood, my
life and myself. For instance, Thich Nhat Hanh talks about how the
whole cosmos may be found in a piece of paper -- clouds, sunshine, the
logger who cut down the tree, the wheat in the bread the logger ate,
the logger’s father, everything. In my book, I hope to suggest
that
if one looks deeply into oneself, into Berkeley, California’s Ocean
View neighborhood, or anywhere else, one will see the entire cosmos.
3) How did your diagnosis of breast
cancer impel you to write a book exploring your connection with the
place you inhabit?
To soothe the terror of dying young, as I feared I might, I took daily
solo walks in the Berkeley hills, and then in the city streets of my
neighborhood. As I walked I found relief in imagining that whenever I
died, the broad terrain would continue, and a limited ‘me’ would
somehow be part of that. I taught myself to include the wild lupine and
Strawberry Creek, the early morning train and even the fumes of
industry, in who and how I conceived myself to be. Opening to an
identity more inclusive than a narrow mortal self, I felt I had to get
to know my home place-- all of it, including its darkness and blemishes.
4) How did the terrain of your Ocean
View neighborhood, in Berkeley, California change over time?
Six thousand years ago, when a rise in sea level caused by melting
glaciers slowed down, mudflats and tidal marshes expanded and human
beings began settling here. For 4,500 years what is now the Ocean
View neighborhood was the site of an Ohlone Indian shellmound.
Beginning in the 1700s the Spanish grazed their livestock here, and
later settled briefly in their ranchos. In the 1800s miners returning
from the gold fields in the Sierra Nevada established a new European
settlement in the East Bay. Ocean View became home to fishermen,
farmers, boat builders, coopers and tanners. Later, as the
University of California was established in the hills and as industry
developed in the flatlands, a new population moved in
to work in the factories. By the 1900s Ocean View had grown into a city
neighborhood, a mix of industry and residence, subject to factory
emissions, drugs and crime. Now this neighborhood is being remade again
as warehouses are turned into artist studios, cafes and shops and
ramshackle Victorian houses renovated. My family lives in one of those
Victorians. No matter where you live, there are layers of
history. In uncovering them, you can learn to truly inhabit your home.
5) You often use the word “inhabit.”
What have you learned about its meaning?
I pursued the derivation of “inhabit” with passion. Discovering
its roots helped me understand what it means to inhabit our experience,
including our place. The word inhabit traces back to an Indo-European
root, ghabh, which traces
further to one line of roots meaning “give”
and another meaning “receive.” Intrigued by the seeming paradox, I
found on further research that gabhasti, from the Sanskrit, means hand.
A friend pointed out to me that a hand gives and receives at the same
time. Indeed, to inhabit is to give and receive at once. As I
continued to settle into my home place, I recognized an ongoing “giving
and receiving” with family, neighbors, the soil of the garden and the
streets of the factory zone. When one inhabits fully, give becomes
receive, receive becomes give.
6) In Already Home you seem to be
offering a new ecology of living in a place. Do you see this as a model
for others in looking at where they live?
Yes. I hope so. I have looked at life in Ocean View from many
angles: every day happenings in the family and on the block, the
natural and human history of the place, the inner workings of my own
mind and the interrelation among all of these. I took on the task of
learning the names of our community: Purple Finches, Nutall’s
Woodpeckers, and Anna’s Hummingbirds, Arroyo Willows and California
Poppies. I studied the changing terrain-- the continuous shifting of
hills and flatlands, creeks and bay. I researched changes resulting
from human choice: water diverted from the high Sierra for local
use, garbage hauled to a nearby town, runoff from our factories and
university laboratories threatening the life of the creeks, groundwater
and bay. I hope to encourage readers to get to know the places where
they live in this way, to come to recognize those places as home, and
to become guardians of their local terrain.
Throughout, I want to show that the Ocean View neighborhood-- all of
its history and its future-- cannot be separated from the play of mind.
This is my version of deep ecology. As the Dalai Lama said to me
when I asked him about this, “Remember, in Buddhism, first we transform
the mind. What’s most important is to transform greed, hatred and
delusion. Everything else-- trees, birds, other creatures-- is a
byproduct.” In Already Home I hope to convey that freeing ourselves of
negative habits of mind is essential to seeing our world clearly and
tending to it with care.
7) You refer to the Ohlone Indian
shellmound in your neighborhood as a metaphor for a new understanding
of home. What do you mean by that?
For 4,500 years the Ohlone Indians made their home on top of what we
call our “garbage dump” and “cemetery.” In these shellmounds,
archaeologists find charcoal, ash, bones and shells-- the inedible
remains of the species that offered life to the community-- layered
with burials of their ancestors. The lives of the shellmound dwellers
were literally built on who and what had given them life. This was
living with awareness of the links between humans, other animals and
plants
and the natural cycles. By contrast, in our contemporary home places,
we lose touch with the cycles that sustain us. Out of fear and disgust,
we remove the bodies of our ancestors to cemeteries; we ship our refuse
out of town or out to sea.
In Already Home, the shellmound becomes a metaphor for a sense of home
where the inhabitants truly live in place, aware of local ancestors,
aware of where the “garbage” goes and where the water comes from, and
in close relationship with neighbors. The shellmound also becomes a
metaphor for the mind. What I call “shellmound mind” is a state of
dynamic awareness, where dread, disgust, anger and other difficult
emotions are compost for insights that enable us to live in place.
8) The surprising prescription from
your acupuncturist to “take more risks” sets you on your quest to get
to know your neighborhood. How can such a risk-taking journey be
helpful?
For me it required courage to explore remote trails in the Berkeley
hills, to enter hidden alleyways off city streets, or to take on
shellmound mind and meditate on the graves of former inhabitants at the
cemetery. It felt like a risk to seek out the death certificates
of early settlers who lived in my house and the one next
door. I found a mother who died of exhaustion and a young man who
committed suicide over a broken romance. Through risks in research and
imagination, I stepped beyond what was comfortable, moving from a
feeling of isolation and me-versus-them to a broad sense of exchange. I
tapped into unexpected recognition and tenderness, for those who lived
before me in this place, and through that, forgiveness for myself and
generations of my own family, with their particular feuds and
heartaches, not so different, I realized, from those of every other
family. Such explorations can be deeply healing.
9) You translate traditional Buddhist
practice into something you call “skunk practice.” What is that?
On an early risk-taking adventure in the hills, my dog Cleo disappeared
into the woods and encountered a skunk. Offered an urgently-needed lift
home by a local ranger, Cleo and I clambered into the back of her
pickup truck. I found I could only stabilize a terrified Cleo by
immersing myself in that almost unthinkable stench. Clasping her
skunk-saturated body to my breast, I learned with graphic immediacy
that I could embrace what I had thought unembraceable. In my subsequent
adventures (and misadventures), I took on “skunk practice” as a
challenge, a kind of mindfulness practice in my daily life in my home
neighborhood. Skunk practice is inclusive; it doesn’t leave anything
out, no matter how
dark or scary, no matter how much it stinks.
10) You are rawly honest in delivering
stories of your personal life. What is valuable about that for
others?
It was not easy for me to be honest in portraying my struggles with my
own ego, with a tendency towards anger; with my yearnings, moments of
tenderness and upsets in being a mother and neighbor, but I tried to
tell my stories true. This is a daunting task, as it’s easy to fool
oneself. But I felt I did not have a choice. I have never been
comfortable taking on a wise, omniscient voice. So the only voice I
could speak through was personal and questioning. I hope that my
honesty with myself will encourage readers to be more honest with
themselves Throughout the book I’ve juxtaposed small personal
confusions and reactions with vast impersonal movements of history, of
the evolution of the place and its inhabitants. Perhaps this will help
readers as it has me, in taking the ups and downs of life less
personally-- with more of a sense of humor and good will. The
poem by Zen master Soyen Shaku that serves as the epigraph for the
final section of the book suggests what I hope to convey.
11) When you talk about the landscape
in your book, you are also talking about an inner landscape. Could you
give an example?
At one point in my quest to get to know the neighborhood I sensed that
I couldn’t go any further until I explored the pavement. This
quickly revealed itself to be an element of both my mind and the street
outside. In Already Home, I compared the asphalt and concrete that pave
over streams with the pavement of denial in my mind. In shattering the
external “pavement” I broke through the denial that had allowed me to
ignore the potentially toxic industry emissions in my neighborhood.
Through research and imagination, I also broke through the asphalt lots
and concrete culverts to see earth-process, fire-process,
creek-process-- the cycles of ongoing life.
12) Other memoirs of place and spirit
such as Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge, John Hanson Mitchell’s
Ceremonial Time, and Kathleen Norris’s Dakota find a web of connection
in a rural environment. How could you possibly find the same in the
midst of the city?
For the writers of place you mention, the cycles of the natural world
have a spiritual dimension-- the mineral cycles, water cycles, air
cycles and nutrient cycles are sacramental. This is as true in the city
as it is in the country, even if it is less visible. I love how Gary
Snyder says, “Knowing who we are and knowing where we are are
intimately linked.” So, as city dweller, I took on the task of
intimately knowing the urban place where I live.
This task has been a challenge in Ocean View, where, as in most
other city neighborhoods, even the terrain seems to have lost contact
with itself: the Bay is clogged by landfill, the creeks culverted, the
air fouled, the sand along the shoreline sold, and the soil paved!
Nonetheless, through the nose of my dog Cleo, I have tracked the hidden
smells of life. With Cleo’s guidance, I discovered opossum droppings in
the gutters, gopher holes in an abandoned lot. Sniffing below the train
tracks in the zone of warehouses and industry, I made my sleuthing more
inclusive, following the scent of fumes of traffic and industry.
To sustain connection in this urban world, neighbors on my corner
made gates in our back fences so we could easily pass back and forth
into each others yards; thus we’ve borrowed sugar, fixed each others
plumbing or computers, fed each others cats and dogs, or when family
squabbles have become too intense, sent our kids next door. We’ve
shared cuttings from our gardens and weekly dinners of leftovers. We’ve
gathered at 6:00 am in one of our basements to ring a meditation bell,
to practice paying attention while sitting in silence together.
I hope my book will be an invitation to others-- to cut doors in
their fences, to swap gardening tools (and occasionally children), to
share dinners, and perhaps silence, meditation or prayer with their
neighbors.
13) In your search for home you
explore homelessness: a homeless woman you befriend, homeless dogs and
raccoons, as well as homeless monks in the Buddhist tradition. These
are vastly different experiences of homelessness. Yet you connect them.
Unlike the homeless woman Dee who had at times slept in our family car,
the raccoons who were shipped from our urban neighborhood to the
country, or the rat forcibly extricated from our refrigerator, my
family has been blessed with a fine Victorian house for shelter. And
for that I am grateful. Yet I have often been haunted by a sense of not
quite belonging. I haven’t felt “at home.” My colleague, Buddhist
writer Wes Nisker describes this contemporary malaise as “our common
homelessness.” Throughout my book, stories of the exploration of
Ocean View alternate with stories about my neighbor Dee-- kicked out
for drinking and living on the street, often suffering from cold and
rain or lack of food. While I’ve remained warm and dry in my
house, Dee’s homelessness wouldn’t let me forget that uncomfortable
place in myself that yearns to be welcomed and embraced, to find
permanent safety and security.
Buddhist monks call themselves “the Homeless Ones,” leaving behind
the household home that offers only temporary safety. This choice for
homelessness is a step on the spiritual path towards freeing the mind
from false security; it is certainly different from the homelessness
imposed on my neighbor Dee or the raccoons, and also different from my
existential homelessness. But conversations with some Buddhist
monks on the meaning of homelessness for them pointed me towards a
deeper understanding of home. I was reminded that a house is not a
home. No house of bricks or boards could offer me the enduring safety
and sustenance I yearned for. As I became intimate with the place
where I lived and settled more fully into a wide sense of myself, I
began to glimpse an inner sense of home. No matter who we are, through
a shift in perception, we can see it. We are already home.
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