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A Q & A with Barbara Gates on
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
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.
One hut built on the whole universe. 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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