Shall We Come
Home?
Thoughts on Why We Don't and How We Might
Craig Chalquist, PhD
In what we are calling "creative restoration," it is not a restoration to an idealized past - a golden age - that is sought or that is possible. By creative restoration we mean psychologically-minded cultural work and culturally-minded psychological work that crafts psyche and world in the image of the deeply desired; that provides a healing context where what has been torn can be reimagined and sutured in concert with others.
-- Helene Schulman Lorenz and Mary Watkins, "Individuation, Seeing-through, and Liberation: Depth Psychology and Colonialism"If we don't organize for a sane world, we will surely get an insane one.
-- Susan Rosenthal, Power and Powerlessness
In the Victorian era Freud determined the chief cultural repression to be erotized instinct. Rollo May followed up in the mid-1900s by reporting that it had shifted to the sense of anomie or emptiness. What is it today?It dawns on more and more of us that what we face today was present in the time of May, the time of Freud, and perhaps all the way back to the farmers who migrated forth from the Fertile Crescent. It convinced mad Columbus he had reached Paradise, drove sailing ships outward into a plunderous Age of Exploration, lifted rockets to "escape" velocity, turned the Valley of Heart's Delight to silicon, funded the false hominess of Disneyland. Today its voice breaks into the open, grows stronger than earphones can keep out. From what do we try to escape at such high velocities?
From the deep desire to come home.
The need to come home remains so heavily repressed that we scorn even the possibility. No sooner does someone wonder out loud what kinds of communities we most desire to belong to than someone else intones the somber line of those whom Abraham Maslow called "nay-saying existentialists": We are thrown into an uncaring world, adrift, bereft, and ultimately alone. The only authentic experience is that of the exile, the orphan, the wanderer. No one can fault these stoics for asking for too much.
American culture broadcasts all this writ large, its wanderers looking for the next settlement around the bend. Describing those who first invaded this continent, Wendell Berry observed that, "Having left Europe far behind, they had not yet in any meaningful sense arrived in America, not yet having devoted themselves to any part of it without destroying it. Because they belonged to no place, it was almost inevitable that they should behave violently toward the places they came to. We still have not, in any meaningful way, arrived in America."
So inured are we to feeling like exiles (Linda Buzzell-Saltzman calls this "dysplacement"), to the resignation of belonging nowhere and to no one and nothing, that what would have felt to our ancestors like an unbearable, lonely hell of nonbeing seems normal to us, except of course for all the undiagnosed social and psychological symptoms of it usually dismissed as purely personal failings. Conquest provides a very public example, for at bottom it represents a false solution to the problem of rootedness and belonging to the world. Clue: the alienated perpetuate it, never the grounded, the rooted, the intelligently nomadic, or the emotionally secure. Conquest is false (because unconscious and destructive) homecoming. And so people more rooted are driven from their homes and homelands by the insecure in mad pursuit of security. And so jets take leave of the ground and fly to the Mideast to rocket the cradle and bomb Eden.
The environmental crisis can be seen as an industrialized assault on Earth itself, home of all our homes. Every day nitrous fertilizers first developed as poison gas fuel a war on and against the ground. Agricultural runoffs from coastal development threaten coral reefs everywhere with extinction, in effect melting ecologically necessary organic walls as those of cement and steel rise higher. Sprawl, border, fence, gate, restriction, checkpoint, partition, segregation: the imagery of division defends heavily against reopening the connections and belongings basic to human and environmental well-being.
When we do begin to glimpse the possibility of homecoming, we tend to run it through two filters: we translate it immediately into the language of redemption, salvation, enlightenment, security, consumption, or health; then we assign it to the domain of individual strivings. Before we know it we've signed up for a new class in personal growth, hired a new therapist, purchased a new fitness program to be watched alone at home, learned a new contemplative practice, subscribed to a new philosophy bullet-pointed with the repackaged rhetoric of individual achievement.
Those of us who are activists retain similar filters. But: sovereignty and self-reliance, healthy food and going local, social justice and a wider range of choices, participatory democracy and wisdom in politics: might we not regard these goals as facets of coming home? Why not start the discussion from the largely unspoken need to come back to the world together? Every territory remains occupied in which we cannot exercise our freedom to live as we choose, work as we want, and say what we mean.
Yet even these goals will not satisfy so long as we lack a vision of deep attachment to place. Without that vision we tend to literalize the attachment, as though being outdoors or purchasing a homestead were enough to safeguard our health or happiness. More direct contact with the natural, breathing world is a necessary condition of human sanity, but certainly not a sufficient one, else every logger, miner, and trigger-happy hunter would have furnished us exemplary models long ago. Scenic Malibu and scenic Carpinteria share more than seaside beauty in common: the heights of their bluffs are more than matched by their mounting overdose incidents.
Without squeezing every possibility for reattachment into one box, a workable vision of homecoming should, at the very least, offer an analysis of blocks and resistances to coming home, focus on the close connections between ecological and social justice, interpret "personal" disorders and distress as responses to a collective epidemic of detachment from self and world, and invite us to imagine the communities we would most enjoy living in.
Then why haven't we done this already? Certainly not because we can't. It's been done in clans and tribes and villages since before the dawn of history. A species that can invent poetry, physics, writing, and dance exerts powers that can reach across the universe.
We haven't made ourselves a heaven on Earth because the long Age of Empires has conditioned us to hand our powers over to others: to the expert, the official, the leader, the corporation, the state. The result has been death, greed, poverty, racism, sexism, state terrorism, and a dependency so perilous that most of our food, water, clothing, and energy comes from outside our communities where we have no control over it. How many of us could make a house? Grow our own food? Provide our own transportation?
It is of the nature of empire to reverse the natural order of things, denying us freedom in the name of freedom, dismantling democracy in the name of democracy, silencing voices in the name of free speech. And so as millions starve in the name of opportunity and enterprise, the very skin and lungs of Earth are blistering, overheated by the engines of mass consumption and waste. This destruction of the evolutionary wisdom of our planet now goes by the name of progress.
If history proves anything at all, it's that hierarchical civilizations striving to dominate the world always perish of their own self-contradictions. If it proves anything else, it's that all our sacrifices, all our art, all our activism, tears, and aspirations reflect like sudden rainbow flashes in a mist some aspect or glimmer of the grand human project of finally feeling at home again. Not regressively, as in an impossible return to some lost childhood, but with a wily wanderer's hard-earned seasoning and callus-fingered embrace at long last. Whole systems and realms of thought, entire cosmologies, borrow their apparent density from half-remembered echoes of belonging not yet patterned firmly and freely into place.
It's time we took our powers back and fashioned something beautiful for ourselves and the planet we have torn, abused, ignored, deified, overidentified with, underserved, but seldom experienced as part of ourselves just as we are part of it: not a parent or a resource, but a living, sensitive co-creator in everything we do, live, and dream.
In short, it's time we came of age as a species. Whether we leave the cradle, trash it, or remain asleep in it depends on the quality of our attachment to it: mature if secure, immature if not.
Rather than remaining a vision handed down to "the masses" (such a load of contempt in that term!) by some lone genius, the vision of deeply coming home as adults rather than children emanates from many sources and many landscapes. We will have to fill it in together by reflecting on it, experimenting with it, and living it out with each other. What we make from the ground up and in accord with nature's cycles and rhythms--which are also our own--stands a far better chance of survival than anything imposed from the top down.