The Idea of Home

A long time ago it seems, I received a song and I called that song 'Home'. When I say received, I mean that it just came to me fully formed - words, chords, melody and all - while I was stretched out in a hammock. It was a kind of magic. There was no song writing going on, no planning, it just came. I won't go into the whole song but it starts with the line 'I left my home a long time ago' and the final verse starts with 'I found my home beyond the stars'. I don't know why this particular song came to me, its message being rather metaphysical but over time I came to understand its mystical message. 

At the time, I had a home up in the mountains of central Portugal. My partner then and I were trying to create a beautiful place that would one day become a retreat centre. It was hard going, especially in summer, as the heat can be unbearable, and we lived off grid with no electricity supply apart from our solar system, no mains water apart from the water piped in from our spring and just gas bottles for heating water and cooking. When we first arrived in May 2013, we lived in a Bell tent for a few months and it was like an extended camping holiday and we just settled into a very different rhythm of living. Of course, friends were curious and we had an almost never ending stream of visitors that first summer plus we were getting to know our nearest neighbours and others who lived not far away who were also living similar quasi-hippy lifestyles! Suffice to say we didn't get a lot done that summer. In the autumn, we moved into a caravan on the land and began work on restoring the house. That took a while.

Although the spring and summer were wonderful periods, the autumn and winter were hard in a caravan.  Being on a north-facing slope in the mountains and having a large amount of mature Chestnut trees between us and the sun, we were often cold although we had a woodburner in the caravan that was at times just too hot. It could get very wet as well and extremely windy. Basically, we were at the mercy of the elements. We lived like that for three years until finally our house was ready and we, our two cats, a dog could move in. It was a real home at last even though the land had been home since the beginning. 

A year later and enormous fires raged throughout the country. We thought we were safe in our lush green valley but we were not spared. Slowly, the fire crept over the shoulder of a nearby slope, still far enough away that disaster could be averted. We had already evacuated the land the day before when the local farmer's wife, who supplied us with eggs and goat's cheese, had called my partner. "It's coming," she said, "you need to leave now." Ominous words that struck deep. And so we left. We sprinkled water for what good it would do on our garden, took a few basic things that in retrospect were completely impractical and yet inspired, packed our cats, Babu and Nushi, into cardboard boxes which they fought their way out of, and taking our dog Tinka on a lead we headed down to the stream, crossed it and went to our neighbours where they were packing their pick-up ready to leave. Unfortunately, our cats had escaped out of their boxes and all we could do was instruct them to stay by the stream. It was a heart-rending moment to leave them but we could not stay and at some deeper level, I knew they would be OK. The orange glow in the sky got brighter. At one point, it seemed like some Dante-esque inferno. We drove to the village above us and  from its medieval castle walls, we watched the fire's progress throughout the night, all of our neighbours and us and our various dogs taking refuge in some kind-hearted French people's holiday let. In the morning, it seemed like the fire had stopped, halted, and so we went to the café to celebrate, drinking coffee and eating toasted sandwiches. Laughing and sighing with relief, an air of joyous, peaceful contentment settling over us. It did not last.

By late morning, the wind picked up again, blowing at the embers of the fire, whipping it up into a fire storm of epic proportions. Although we could not see our valley due to a hill in the way, we could mark its progress by the colour of the smoke. Big black flumes spiralled into the sky and we knew that something toxic was burning. By this time, the fire had also reached the lower slopes below the village were in and thick smoke was hanging over us and we decided to evacuate the village too. We climbed into the back of another neighbour's pick-up and drove to a town about 6 miles away. This time, I felt like a true refugee, a strange feeling indeed, a juxtaposition, for me at least, between feeling devastated and free. I thought that perhaps we had lost everything bar the clothes we had on our backs and the few possessions we carried with us. When we got to another café, I called my elderly father in England and told him about this. He was obviously concerned but could not find the words to advise or comfort. We were then all invited to go to another house to rest by a Portuguese couple we met at the café. This house was a time-warp from another age and had not changed since possibly the 1940s or 50s. It was rather charming if a touch surreal. So all of us camped out there for the day, trying to rest, endlessly chatting, the smokers smoking, drinking coffee, eating, lying on beds and waiting for news. 

Finally some news came. A Dutch neighbour, Stef, who had stayed in the valleys to protect his house, came back and told us our house was OK. He had found a small fire on one of the doors which he had put out but it was all fine. Later, that evening, I went back with him along the rough tracks to check on the land. It had been badly burned but miraculously the garden in front of the house had been spared as had a teepee which was still standing in all its whiteness and in which we had had a ceremony just a few weeks before. We were lucky. All our neighbours' places had also survived. Most importantly, so had our cats who were a bit confused about it all but fine. The land was black and charred but we could still live there. Well, we did for a while but it became increasingly difficult. Our car, which had broken down on the first day of the fires, was still out and to cap it all, my mother died and then a deluge of rain brought down a mass of black sludge down the mountainside which ended up in our spring and poisoned the feeder pool of our drinking water. For a while, we carried on living there, getting water from the stream for cooking and cleaning and water from a spring a few miles away for drinking. I had the use of another car a friend lent us but I had to use the wheelbarrow to transport things from the track down our long and twisting drive. In the end, the whole process of living there became too much and another friend's father kindly offered us his house rent-free about 20 miles away. We took the chance and abandoned the farm, taking all of our animals with us. 

It was the beginning of a slow process of leaving our home. Later the next year, my partner and I separated and I travelled abroad, first to India to heal my body, and then to the UK to start an intensive three month storytelling course. 

After the course finished in June, I decided not to drive back to Portugal but to head north to Scotland, after checking up on my father. I envisaged wild camping on remote beaches, having small driftwood fires and declaiming stories and poetry to the bemused gulls and other wildlife. It didn't quite work out like that but during this time a process started inside me. I began to feel like I didn't belong here, in this country, that I had been away too long and that I had indeed 'left my home a long time ago'. It was an odd, uncomfortable feeling of rootlessness. I felt like an impostor in my mother country yet at the same time I felt a yearning to be at home here. The one home I remembered with great affection was the small idyllic oak-beamed cottage in Kent that my parents had rented for about 15 years while my brother and I grew up but that was a long time ago. I didn't know where I belonged now. As summer passed, the pressure grew on me to return to Portugal and take care of my business there in the only home I really had. I resisted. I watched the August harvest from the ancient Anglo-Saxon hillfort in Dorset near my father's home. It was somehow comforting yet at the same time unnerving because I knew I had to leave. I did have to get back by September because my house-sitter was leaving and my cats would be there alone. I had lots of stuff to do there too. I crawled back through the southern counties visiting and staying with a number of friends, putting off the inevitable until I finally found myself at Dover, waiting in line for the ferry. Then I was on the ferry and out the other side, driving through France in late summer. First to Paris to stay with an old friend and his family for a couple of days and then the big slog south, retracing in reverse some of the route that I had taken with my brother when we had driven north to the UK earlier that year. The anxiety continued. The feeling of not belonging here or there. I drove through France, camping at places that I had wanted to visit like the enormous sand dunes, the Dune de Pilat, and then into Spain and across to the Picos de Europa. Up and over the mountains I went, listening to Test Match Special to distract me from the gnawing sense of dread. 

Finally, after a long hot trip, I arrived back in the valley. It was incredibly hot for early September and the land was dry. The garden was almost dead but the cats were pleased to see me. I went across to visit my neighbours. It was empty and abandoned as if they hadn't been living there for some time. Sara and Emil's garden was usually lush and full of healthy plants and there were always happy animals about. Not this time though. I went up the track to Wallay and Isa's place. Again, empty, abandoned, dry and all the fruit trees they had planted were almost dead. At that moment, I felt as if I was again living in a sort of hell, as if I was the only surviving member of the human race. Life and home is all about community. Now there was none.

My feelings of hopelessness and despair filed themselves back into my mental filing cabinet for future reference and I set about my tasks again and soon got back into a rhythm. I had been trying to sell the farm since the middle of the previous year, maybe even before, so this became one of my main goals: to make the land and house look clean, presentable and attractive to potential buyers. I began to become quite good at showing people the land, developing a certain 'sales talk', pointing out all the benefits and things I would do if I was to remain. Why do you want to leave this paradise they asked. I couldn't tell them, it was just too deep inside, too personal so I gave them bland answers. Meanwhile, the urge to leave my home grew and intensified. I felt as if I was waging some sort of war - and in my mind I probably was! Events seemed to conspire to bind me to this overgrown land - it had recovered after the fires of two years before. I implored the spirits of the land to release me. They sent wild boar in response. No joke. It seemed the entire wild boar population of those mountains had found the ideal holiday retreat centre and descended on my land en masse. It had after all become a retreat centre but not for humans! The damage they made to the terraces was extensive and it presented a potential obstacle to a sale. I had no way of combatting their nightly antics. Friends told me of the different ways to deter them: find their routes onto the land and then... First of all it was oranges. Place oranges all over the place. My land was huge, maybe 5 hectares of wilderness and as many runways onto it as some sort of infernal airport. However, I did buy oranges, lots of them, and dropped them into the most obvious areas. The wild boar ignored them. Then it was mothballs. These I distributed widely too. Absolutely no effect. I may as well have opened a dry cleaning service for them. Diesel was also mentioned but I drew the line at that. One night, I flung open my skylight and shone my incredibly bright torch into the darkness to see about twenty boars fleeing up the hill. Without any means of deterring them, I could do nothing. My cats ignored my worries and carried on grooming themselves. In the end, after some fruitless attempts at filling in the massive craters the boars made, I ignored it too. In late winter, the boars headed back up the mountains.

In the spring and early summer of last year, 2020, I finally sold my place and flew to the UK. I stayed with my girlfriend at the time, in the north, for a while but I was increasingly having to travel south to visit my ailing father. In time, I started living in a tiny house in someone's garden a few miles away from him, which is where I still am. The idea of a home is still uppermost in my mind as I am now in a very expensive country where prices for homes are out of reach and where rentals are getting harder to find. I don't have enough money to buy my own place even with the money from my father's estate. He died in February this year and didn't own his own home. My brother and I have been itemising all my parents' lovely antiques and other belongings, readying them for sale. We may be lucky and get some good prices but it will most likely not be enough to buy a house. Much as I would like a home right now, it seems out of my grasp for now. Strangely, I am not overly concerned about this. I don't feel pity for myself either. I am just grateful that I have a roof over my head at all, albeit a small one. Inside myself,  I feel a proper home is coming and I need to be patient.

Quite often, I will go for walks, meditations and prayers in my local ancient forest. A few weeks ago I had a realisation that the forest was my home and in a wider context, our Earth itself. I have been fortunate enough in my life never to have been without a home, not for long anyway, and that somehow a home is always there. I think of all the unfortunate people in the world who don't have their own homes or who make do with shacks, often living with dignity in appalling and squalid circumstances. We all need a place to lay our heads where we can be dry and safe. We need to rebuild community and help those less well off than us. I don't wish to preach about it, we all do what we can for others and when one day we have reached a tipping point of consciousness on this planet, we'll address all the blatant wrongs that governments and corporations largely turn a blind eye to. Maybe if tech billionaires stopped trying to invest in billion dollar space explorations and put that money into community, into proper ways of feeding people, of cleaning up all the toxicity and giving people homes, we could avert catastrophe. I don't have any desire to live anywhere else but on this planet, although I'd love to visit other planets, and that wherever my heart is, that is my home. It could be anywhere because I am always at home in my heart, strange as that may sound but the phrase 'Home is where the heart is' can be reversed to mean the same thing. Home is not necessarily a picture postcard cottage with roses growing up the walls, much as I like that image. It is where I live and breathe and love and write and play. It is out in the forest at twilight when the animals reappear and the birds settle down. It is among the climbing honeysuckle that looks like sunlight in the treetops on overcast days. It is here in this tiny home where I sit and write. It can be anywhere. I belong here for now, where I am and when I am not here, I will belong somewhere else. I can let go of ideas of belonging anywhere in particular and pray for a proper home to come my way one day and I am sure it will but until then, and beyond, I belong to the Earth and to the great mystery.

Welcome home.