"Finding Home"
Delivered at Unity Chapel, Spring Green, WI
July 14, 2012
Reading
HOMECOMING by Rev. Elizabeth Tarbox
I returned at sunrise to my special beach at Shipyard Lane, where morning is a soft line on the horizon and the trees have been touched by the fastidious brush of spring. And I walked slowly to the edge of the sweet ocean that moves and calls me, and I dipped my fingers in her hair and tasted the salt and I knew I was home.
I want to bring you the warm smell of spring there; recreate for you the twist of a certain old wild apple tree with branches frosted with blossom, or hum the song of the chorale that sounds from every branch. I want you to place your bare feet down on that cool sand, and draw your breath deep into your own secret inner world where your truth and only your truth is spoken.
I want to press your hands lightly to the smooth grey rocks and show you the chipmunks that make their home between the rocks and the beach plum bushes. But if that cannot be, if you and I are too far apart, or don’t even know each other’s names, then know at least that Shipyard Lane gives me more love than I can use, plenty enough to share. And I would share it with you.
HOMECOMING by Rev. Elizabeth Tarbox
I returned at sunrise to my special beach at Shipyard Lane, where morning is a soft line on the horizon and the trees have been touched by the fastidious brush of spring. And I walked slowly to the edge of the sweet ocean that moves and calls me, and I dipped my fingers in her hair and tasted the salt and I knew I was home.
I want to bring you the warm smell of spring there; recreate for you the twist of a certain old wild apple tree with branches frosted with blossom, or hum the song of the chorale that sounds from every branch. I want you to place your bare feet down on that cool sand, and draw your breath deep into your own secret inner world where your truth and only your truth is spoken.
I want to press your hands lightly to the smooth grey rocks and show you the chipmunks that make their home between the rocks and the beach plum bushes. But if that cannot be, if you and I are too far apart, or don’t even know each other’s names, then know at least that Shipyard Lane gives me more love than I can use, plenty enough to share. And I would share it with you.
Sermon
This is my Shipyard Lane. One of the places where, like the poet, I return each year to treasure the twists in the trees,
the chorale of bird song, the sound of wind through the fields, the intricate majesty of wild flowers.
Where I press my feet into the earth – dry and parched as it is this year – and know that I am home.
This is my Shipyard Lane because standing here, my soul is filled up with the love of generations gone by and generations to come and, once again, I am reminded that I have been given plenty enough love to share.
Because you are sitting here, I venture to guess that this might be a Shipyard Lane kind of place for you too.
Even if this is your first time to the Valley or to the Chapel, perhaps you already feel the comfort that so many discover here.
Perhaps you too feel sense of having found a place that feels like home.
Finding home is a full body experience. Butterflies dance with joy in your stomach. Our shoulders which we carry so high so much of the time fall into place. We let out a deep breath, stale air we have carried with us through all the places that are not-home, and we breathe deep cleansing air that gives us courage to start again.
There is a special, sacred feeling that comes over us when we have arrived at that place, that person, or that something that gathers us in
and we know that we are safe, we are loved, we are home.
Now, I am not talking necessarily of home in the sense of “home for the holidays.”
Your Shipyard Lane kind of home might be far from your physical house or the house you grew up in or where you go for Thanksgiving.
Then again, perhaps you are lucky enough that all those places hold the sacred sense of home for you too.
What I’m asking you to call to mind today are the places and times where the deepest part of you, your spirit, your soul, and your body feel most satisfied. The places and times where you feel connected to yourself, to others, to God or the universe or the Earth.
The places and times where you are held in love.
As you remember or experience in this moment that feeling of home, it may be the physical sensations that come to you, the sights and sounds of a place, the smell of a house you visited as a child, the softness of a loved one’s hand in yours or the memory of the feel of a baby in your arms. You may be called home with the smell of a summer rain, or the view of wild flowers along a stretch of road.
A passerby’s perfume, a dream from which you awake smiling.
What brings you home?
Where are you called?
And How?
This happened to me this past spring. I was out for a jog near my home in New Haven and all of the sudden, I smelled home. I’m not sure exactly what it was – the warm smell of spring as this year’s blossoms were beginning to fall and leaves beginning to fill in.
The smell was rich and loamy, the scent of earth and life and sunshine reaching into places hungry for light.
I stopped and sniffed and closed my eyes. I was transported back to my childhood home in Cincinnati Ohio.
Spring in our Cincinnati home is marked by redbud trees. Volunteers spring up every year in my father’s garden, and he has nurtured them during the 25 years we have lived in the house. So now there is a row of stately trees that blossom bright fuchsia in spring and fade into heart shaped leaves in the summer. They are the sweetest thing.
The smell of spring took me back to Easter egg hunts and crocuses lining the path through our front yard. Yellow iris. The iris that bloomed this spring in our Cincinnati garden have known many gardens. My mother brought them with us when we moved to Ohio from the South many years ago. She had moved them before. At one time, long ago, they graced my grandparents’ garden in Atlanta, Georgia in front of a house long-since torn down.
Very soon, imminently, (like, when they get home next weekend) my parents will dig up a set of those bulbs again and take them back to Atlanta. They are going home after forty years.
This summer we packed up the house that has been home to our family for over two decades. We have said and are saying goodbye to the house – each in our own ways. And we are beginning the process of making home again in the place that nurtured my parents as children.
As a family, we leave one home to come into another, knowing that the true essence of home is the place that, as the poet says, moves and calls us, the place (wherever it may be) that we can draw that deep breath in and in doing so, feed our own secret inner worlds, where our truths are spoken.
Immersed in that process, that process of home-leaving and home-coming, as I arrived in the Valley this week, I remembered another homecoming. A number of years ago, my folks and Evan and I embarked on a pilgrimage to Llandussl, Wales, the homeland of Richard and Mallie and family. The land they left on a journey that eventually led them here and, therefore, a journey that culminates in not only this place, but this time, for, were it not for their travels and their making home here, none of us would be here this morning.
Our family was living in Cambridge, England, at the time and so we thought it easy enough to rent a car and drive -- on the “wrong” side of the road, mind you -- to Wales. Considering the number of round-abouts Dad navigated that day, it’s pretty amazing that we only took out one side mirror along the way. We arrived, sobered, having narrowly escaped certain death, and piled out of the car.
We pulled up jacket hoods against the rain and looked around. We looked at each other with open mouths. It was the same.
It was rolling hills -- sheep instead of cows -- but rolling hills and fields, the green was the same, the color the smell. I know that some of you have also made that pilgrimage to Wales, know that that sense of déjà vu, mirror image valleys -- continents apart. We realized, standing there in the village of Llandussl, that our ancestors, once they got their bearings here in America, had traveled West until they found home.
The other night as I lay in my bed at Aldeberan Farm listening to the familiar night sounds of the Valley, I wondered if Mallie had done the same in the mid-nineteeth century. For the first time, I wondered if she was homesick, if the sounds of Wisconsin crickets and critters might have taken her back to Llandussl. I wondered if smells on the breeze might have reminded her the house where she grew up, of the home she had made as a new wife and mother, of the home she had left on distant shores.
And I wondered where she found the strength to make a new home here, in what was then wilderness. The frontier.
Our cousin Jix tells us that she did so by telling stories -- stories she would have heard in the Unitarian chapel of her youth. Stories of Wales, stories that held her truth, stories that taught her many children who they were, gave them roots in the home they’d left as they created new homes for themselves and others here in the Valley.
The Lloyd Joneses created homes here in order to share them. After their mother died, they built this Chapel for each other and for the people of the community. They created a spiritual home, a place to gather for worship and fellowship, a place to revere the great mystery of a love that they believed is freely given. They created a place where a transcendent peace is felt deep within and the simplest pleasures
are to be celebrated with reverence and wonder.
Two of Mallie’s children, Aunt Nell and Aunt Jane created Hillside Home School, where they invited children to come into a space that was part farm, part school, and part home. One of their students, Florence Fifer Bohrer described years later how she had come to the school: Uncle Enos had picked her up at the train station and delivered her to Hillside and into the loving care of the Aunts -- the children at Hillside called all of Richard and Mallie’s children "Aunts" and "Uncles."
Florence promptly told her mother who had travelled with her that she could go. Florence was ready to stay on her own.
She felt at home. Indeed, the school was a place where students were encouraged to make themselves at home. Another student remembered it fondly as “that unique and lovely place.” (Mary Ellen Chase) Our people created unique and lovely places here in the Valley that gave those who found them love -- plenty enough to share.
Home IS that place where we are given love. That love comes from the place itself, from the people we encounter there, from our own souls and our own memories. To me, the love in a home-place comes also from ultimate places:
from the Earth, from the universe, from God.
Home is that place where are not only given love, we are able to take it in, accept it. Believe it.
Home is that place where we know that we are deeply and intimately and ultimately loved.
And when home is far away in time or space. We can call it up, re-call that place, that person, that feeling.
We do not just find home, we make it, again and again in the place and time where we find ourselves now.
Where is home for you?
Where is the place that your soul relaxes, the way feet sink into cool sand at the edge of the ocean.
Where are you transported by the warm smell of spring, by night sounds or the wonder of summer blossoms?
Where is the place where you may have been given enough love that you were able and ready and willing to share it with the world?
It may be the home of your own childhood, or the place where you raised your family. It may be a place you discovered on your own, just for you. A place you have visited year after year, A place you happened upon once, but was so full for you. It may be any place where the people you treasure abide or the place where they live on in precious memory. It may be the place -- any place -- where your children or grandchildren are, or your beloved.
Perhaps, after a life of searching, you have just recently found home. Or maybe you are still looking.
I wish for each of us homecoming.
May we find, in the majesty of the world around us,
or in the quiet stillness of our own inner world,
the love we need to live.
May we create homes wherever we are,
and may all who enter find peace.
In finding home, may we know the love that connects us
to the deepest part of our selves,
to each other
and to that immortal love, that never fades--
that love that anchors each of us.
Whatever we may call it,
may we know that holy love that
moves us and calls us into the
fullness of our being.
May we find our way home.
This is my Shipyard Lane. One of the places where, like the poet, I return each year to treasure the twists in the trees,
the chorale of bird song, the sound of wind through the fields, the intricate majesty of wild flowers.
Where I press my feet into the earth – dry and parched as it is this year – and know that I am home.
This is my Shipyard Lane because standing here, my soul is filled up with the love of generations gone by and generations to come and, once again, I am reminded that I have been given plenty enough love to share.
Because you are sitting here, I venture to guess that this might be a Shipyard Lane kind of place for you too.
Even if this is your first time to the Valley or to the Chapel, perhaps you already feel the comfort that so many discover here.
Perhaps you too feel sense of having found a place that feels like home.
Finding home is a full body experience. Butterflies dance with joy in your stomach. Our shoulders which we carry so high so much of the time fall into place. We let out a deep breath, stale air we have carried with us through all the places that are not-home, and we breathe deep cleansing air that gives us courage to start again.
There is a special, sacred feeling that comes over us when we have arrived at that place, that person, or that something that gathers us in
and we know that we are safe, we are loved, we are home.
Now, I am not talking necessarily of home in the sense of “home for the holidays.”
Your Shipyard Lane kind of home might be far from your physical house or the house you grew up in or where you go for Thanksgiving.
Then again, perhaps you are lucky enough that all those places hold the sacred sense of home for you too.
What I’m asking you to call to mind today are the places and times where the deepest part of you, your spirit, your soul, and your body feel most satisfied. The places and times where you feel connected to yourself, to others, to God or the universe or the Earth.
The places and times where you are held in love.
As you remember or experience in this moment that feeling of home, it may be the physical sensations that come to you, the sights and sounds of a place, the smell of a house you visited as a child, the softness of a loved one’s hand in yours or the memory of the feel of a baby in your arms. You may be called home with the smell of a summer rain, or the view of wild flowers along a stretch of road.
A passerby’s perfume, a dream from which you awake smiling.
What brings you home?
Where are you called?
And How?
This happened to me this past spring. I was out for a jog near my home in New Haven and all of the sudden, I smelled home. I’m not sure exactly what it was – the warm smell of spring as this year’s blossoms were beginning to fall and leaves beginning to fill in.
The smell was rich and loamy, the scent of earth and life and sunshine reaching into places hungry for light.
I stopped and sniffed and closed my eyes. I was transported back to my childhood home in Cincinnati Ohio.
Spring in our Cincinnati home is marked by redbud trees. Volunteers spring up every year in my father’s garden, and he has nurtured them during the 25 years we have lived in the house. So now there is a row of stately trees that blossom bright fuchsia in spring and fade into heart shaped leaves in the summer. They are the sweetest thing.
The smell of spring took me back to Easter egg hunts and crocuses lining the path through our front yard. Yellow iris. The iris that bloomed this spring in our Cincinnati garden have known many gardens. My mother brought them with us when we moved to Ohio from the South many years ago. She had moved them before. At one time, long ago, they graced my grandparents’ garden in Atlanta, Georgia in front of a house long-since torn down.
Very soon, imminently, (like, when they get home next weekend) my parents will dig up a set of those bulbs again and take them back to Atlanta. They are going home after forty years.
This summer we packed up the house that has been home to our family for over two decades. We have said and are saying goodbye to the house – each in our own ways. And we are beginning the process of making home again in the place that nurtured my parents as children.
As a family, we leave one home to come into another, knowing that the true essence of home is the place that, as the poet says, moves and calls us, the place (wherever it may be) that we can draw that deep breath in and in doing so, feed our own secret inner worlds, where our truths are spoken.
Immersed in that process, that process of home-leaving and home-coming, as I arrived in the Valley this week, I remembered another homecoming. A number of years ago, my folks and Evan and I embarked on a pilgrimage to Llandussl, Wales, the homeland of Richard and Mallie and family. The land they left on a journey that eventually led them here and, therefore, a journey that culminates in not only this place, but this time, for, were it not for their travels and their making home here, none of us would be here this morning.
Our family was living in Cambridge, England, at the time and so we thought it easy enough to rent a car and drive -- on the “wrong” side of the road, mind you -- to Wales. Considering the number of round-abouts Dad navigated that day, it’s pretty amazing that we only took out one side mirror along the way. We arrived, sobered, having narrowly escaped certain death, and piled out of the car.
We pulled up jacket hoods against the rain and looked around. We looked at each other with open mouths. It was the same.
It was rolling hills -- sheep instead of cows -- but rolling hills and fields, the green was the same, the color the smell. I know that some of you have also made that pilgrimage to Wales, know that that sense of déjà vu, mirror image valleys -- continents apart. We realized, standing there in the village of Llandussl, that our ancestors, once they got their bearings here in America, had traveled West until they found home.
The other night as I lay in my bed at Aldeberan Farm listening to the familiar night sounds of the Valley, I wondered if Mallie had done the same in the mid-nineteeth century. For the first time, I wondered if she was homesick, if the sounds of Wisconsin crickets and critters might have taken her back to Llandussl. I wondered if smells on the breeze might have reminded her the house where she grew up, of the home she had made as a new wife and mother, of the home she had left on distant shores.
And I wondered where she found the strength to make a new home here, in what was then wilderness. The frontier.
Our cousin Jix tells us that she did so by telling stories -- stories she would have heard in the Unitarian chapel of her youth. Stories of Wales, stories that held her truth, stories that taught her many children who they were, gave them roots in the home they’d left as they created new homes for themselves and others here in the Valley.
The Lloyd Joneses created homes here in order to share them. After their mother died, they built this Chapel for each other and for the people of the community. They created a spiritual home, a place to gather for worship and fellowship, a place to revere the great mystery of a love that they believed is freely given. They created a place where a transcendent peace is felt deep within and the simplest pleasures
are to be celebrated with reverence and wonder.
Two of Mallie’s children, Aunt Nell and Aunt Jane created Hillside Home School, where they invited children to come into a space that was part farm, part school, and part home. One of their students, Florence Fifer Bohrer described years later how she had come to the school: Uncle Enos had picked her up at the train station and delivered her to Hillside and into the loving care of the Aunts -- the children at Hillside called all of Richard and Mallie’s children "Aunts" and "Uncles."
Florence promptly told her mother who had travelled with her that she could go. Florence was ready to stay on her own.
She felt at home. Indeed, the school was a place where students were encouraged to make themselves at home. Another student remembered it fondly as “that unique and lovely place.” (Mary Ellen Chase) Our people created unique and lovely places here in the Valley that gave those who found them love -- plenty enough to share.
Home IS that place where we are given love. That love comes from the place itself, from the people we encounter there, from our own souls and our own memories. To me, the love in a home-place comes also from ultimate places:
from the Earth, from the universe, from God.
Home is that place where are not only given love, we are able to take it in, accept it. Believe it.
Home is that place where we know that we are deeply and intimately and ultimately loved.
And when home is far away in time or space. We can call it up, re-call that place, that person, that feeling.
We do not just find home, we make it, again and again in the place and time where we find ourselves now.
Where is home for you?
Where is the place that your soul relaxes, the way feet sink into cool sand at the edge of the ocean.
Where are you transported by the warm smell of spring, by night sounds or the wonder of summer blossoms?
Where is the place where you may have been given enough love that you were able and ready and willing to share it with the world?
It may be the home of your own childhood, or the place where you raised your family. It may be a place you discovered on your own, just for you. A place you have visited year after year, A place you happened upon once, but was so full for you. It may be any place where the people you treasure abide or the place where they live on in precious memory. It may be the place -- any place -- where your children or grandchildren are, or your beloved.
Perhaps, after a life of searching, you have just recently found home. Or maybe you are still looking.
I wish for each of us homecoming.
May we find, in the majesty of the world around us,
or in the quiet stillness of our own inner world,
the love we need to live.
May we create homes wherever we are,
and may all who enter find peace.
In finding home, may we know the love that connects us
to the deepest part of our selves,
to each other
and to that immortal love, that never fades--
that love that anchors each of us.
Whatever we may call it,
may we know that holy love that
moves us and calls us into the
fullness of our being.
May we find our way home.