Mindstates
Internal Landscape and the Sense of Home
by Deborah Garner
While watching God Grew Tired of Us, a film about Sudanese refugees, I was struck by a scene with a man describing his childhood home with great love and affection. He was clearly describing more than a landscape as he spoke of the lush green of the land, the rich soil, and the abundant animals. He was expressing the love he felt for that land, his connection with it and the life surrounding him there. He referred to his home as his “mother land,” and as he spoke, it was clear that this was an ethereal experience, both bound and unbound by time and place.
As I continued to watch, I realized that I have neither a physical place nor an experience of mothering to inspire such security or radiance in me. I was born in the Bronx, New York, to an Italian-German mother and an Irish father, both of whom came from “broken” homes and were estranged from their families. The only animals I saw regularly outside of the zoo were ants, squirrels, pigeons, and house pets. My parents were distracted by making money, and were not part of the new wave of “groovy” parents. I was raised in neighborhoods with kids who were not unlike me. I used to cry about the Native Americans and how they lost their land.
As a teenager, I became concerned about how many people were living in refugee camps around the globe. I related to them and didn’t know why. I felt so bad that they didn’t have the right to go home and I worked for years to have human rights declarations signed and acknowledged. Now, I see that I could relate since I am also a “refugee” of sorts. While my plight was not as dire as those living in refugee camps, I was also born into a broken lineage that split from the land generations ago.
Without this lineage, our parenting has changed and respect for our elders has evaporated. Our modern mythology is partially based on blaming our parents, specifically our mothers, which results in our collective sense of dis-ease. Many of us don’t share this Sudanese man’s reverence for his mother; in fact, some of us have great disdain for the women who gave us life. I wonder if we have taken this disparagement and used it to “cut the cord,” not only with our actual mothers, but with our sense of “mother” in general, and “Mother Earth” in particular, which has enabled us to treat our own bodies and that of the earth in ways that would have been unthinkable before.
This isn’t to negate the fact that many of us have legitimate gripes with our parents and our life situations, or to say that we would all be better off if we lived as indigenous people have lived. It’s just to point out that we have “thrown out the baby with the bath water” and lost the mothering principle in our lives as we have rejected our physical mothers. Whereas indigenous peoples have been able to transfer the cut umbilicus from physical mother to earth mother, we modern westerners have not known where to turn.
In this quest for an etheric sense of “home,” many of us have tried to co-opt indigenous traditions and make them our own. Yet most indigenous traditions are now detached from the land, left to communicate their age-old wisdom to western ears before their earth-based customs are lost. Even if they feel cozy or familiar or resonant, they are not our own lineage, and you can’t mimic a learned connection to the earth and one’s heritage. With all these broken connections to the earth, our ancestors and our traditions, we are at a unique crossroads as a species; there is no “turning back” to the way we all used to live. We must forge a new connection to home.
So how do we do this? How did we do it when we inhabited the planet before the onset of imperialism, or whenever we stopped living in harmony with the earth and each other? We have not all been devoid of a sense of home or belonging since then. Or have we? Is that what all this conquest and tinkering with the external landscape has been about? By building huge cities and leveling mountains, are we attempting to get back that from which we had splintered off at some point?
In many spiritual traditions, we are told there is no “out there,” which is an encouragement not to focus on the details of external life. So, in this case, rather than trying to claim someone else’s tradition as our own, fix our broken lineages, or manipulate our environment, we can start by getting in touch with our internal landscape and exploring our sense of home. Begin by asking yourself the following questions: Do I have a sense of home? If so, what is the sensation, color, texture, and the emotion it conjures within me?. How has my experience of my mother affected my sense of home? Would I still have this feeling if the person, place or thing were gone?
Then, close your eyes and take a few deep breaths. Focus your attention inward, gently noticing but releasing the sounds you hear around you. Then set your intention to discover your own internal landscape, and imagine entering the place in your body where your umbilical cord was, traveling deep into the center of your own universe. Look around, and really experience your environment. Notice and explore what is around you. Spend as much time as you like here, and do what you can to interact with your surroundings to make you feel most comfortable. Pay attention to how you feel—do you feel good here? If not, what can you do to change this landscape so that you do? How do you feel in your body? Your mind? Your spirit?
With practice, we can all find home within ourselves and stop looking outside for this sense of connection. Of course, people and beautiful surroundings can help us to feel more held and nurtured, but it is best not to depend on them. The more we turn inward, the more enriching all our landscapes will become, and the more ethereal will be our experience of home, bound and unbound by time and place.