ON REMEMBERING HOME
2024.09.08 Contd.
I find comfort in knowing that home is wherever I am. Here, now, my home is here—now. Home is in my abstracted, scattered ability to form memories of times long past—a fleeting yet eternal, palimpsest-like record of the now—continually lengthening with my time thrown on Earth.
Home is my grandma, my family, and the knowledge that I am them. It is a story shared, silence filled, and rituals repeated.
Yet, it is also a product of distance. It is a product of being still—where silence is not filled, where our threads of connection can be contemplated. It is on this scale of now that I see “now” as an amorphous and animate land: a glacial lake draining, a bountiful ecology, the human Stone Age, the agricultural revolution, the colonizing of this land, and a shared meal between loved ones. Home and now both twist and morph, scaling ad infinitum.
It is for this reason that I find comfort in presence—more than in any goldenrod memory, translated into something it never truly was. Home is being able to stand still, where all moments—forgotten or never remembered—are part of me. They are layers of strata, settling with my presence at the surface.
The long now reminds me that home is not bound to a place or time, but to the continuity of being. It is the weathering of stone and the permanence of impermanence—the recognition that each moment is both infinitesimal and eternal. Whether I remember it or not, it is mine, and I am part of it.