The seasons here follow such a different rhythm than what I grew up with—the near-even three months with each season. I’m surprised to find it bothers me less than it used to—maybe I’ve finally given up my stubborn resistance to the latitude and I’ve adapted to the change of seasons here— the short and early fall, springs that move from melt to summer within a week. It used to feel so ominous when people would say out loud that fall had begun in late July. I would internally scream no, not yet, not yet, please let us still have a few more weeks.
Now when I see the few birch leaves that fall yellow, even in the middle of summer, it feels less like an omen and more like a reassurance that cold will return—a reminder of movement that’s circular, not linear.
Before the rain came last week, it hadn’t rained since October. To hear full soakings of rain on the roof again had that same sense of reassurance, of drawing comfort in the shifts to come. To notice the darkness that slowly begins to reappear when I wake in the middle of the night, the surprise of delight I felt seeing the house almost fully dark again. Days of rain that hint at that growing darkness as well, shading the sky dramatically, bringing new shadows back into the house—and the need for a few lamps lit, the feeling of soft enclosure that it brings. My son came down the morning it rained and looked at me with his eyes sparkling and said “it’s cool and dark!” He’s grown up knowing what a fall that starts in July is like—he loves all of the seasons, but especially fall and its promise of darkness again.
I’ve grown so accustomed to routine these past two years. I typically stick to what I like for the most part, comfortable in habits. I have been told many times that I should mix it up, variety is the spice of life. But each time I did I was dissatisfied and honestly just wished I could have had what I always wanted. Society is so quick to tell others that being comfortable is a sign of a problem, a softness, a not trying. What is comfortable is a problem, something that needs to be busted up, pushed beyond, fixed—that must avoid stasis, staying in place, the cowardly act of not moving.
But to stasis can be a peace, a meditation, a strength, and a balance. Its root lies in Latin statica, Greek statikos—causing to stand, skilled in weighing, from a stem of histanai—to make to stand, to place in balance, weigh—to make or be firm. Stasis can be strength—a mountain rooted in geologic time.
We are so quick to move, push, mix up—and there are times of course that we do need to go beyond what is comfortable, to push beyond certain boundaries or fears, to be active. But I question the worship and need of always moving. Places we call home are places we are supposed to leave and disregard, have no relationship or tie to that would hinder us. To want to stay in a place you love becomes a criticism for not having wider ambitions. We’re expected to move for a job, to focus on making a career the success—not to make a life in a place that holds meaning for us otherwise.
It’s the same with how routine becomes something that makes you stuck, a groundhog day—an endless, mindless loop that we’re always desperate to get out of, some fugue state served as a punishment for a hero who needs to move on. It’s the odyssey that counts—the journey away from home where the hero can prove himself far away from those who keep things like a home and lands and place for a return that never serves—because you can’t go back home again.
Adriana Cavarero, writing a critique of the Odyssey in In Spite of Plato, writes:
Penelope seeks refuge neither in lack of action nor in the self-denial that comes from prolonged waiting. She weaves and unweaves, and in so doing she delineates an impenetrable space where she belongs to herself, while she prolongs the frustration of the disappointed usurpers…. Simply to move into the world, without planting one’s roots there, and with no protection for one’s belonging to oneself, is a mode of being in the world that men want for women. To enter the world, that world at that time, is a way of accepting a place and role that the world of men has provided: men reserve the whole world for themselves, and assign to women a nook by the hearth. But then this nook becomes a space that is impenetrable to the motives of the world, a hearth of one’s own.
When we were out north last week or so, the rains had just begun settling in and were intermittent, causing the earth to smell more fragrant, and to feel more cool. And I’m not sure that there are many nicer sounds than waking to the sound of rain on the roof.
And so my thoughts turned to how much of a refuge I’ve always felt home to be—and how difficult it has become to own a home. In Anchorage right now the city has annexed a campground as their offering for the houseless in lieu of shutting down the only shelter. It’s a travesty. And in Portland, the crisis grows while the region experiences intense heat. I can’t help but think about it all as I have been able to sort of own a home (or at least a mortgage), to find it safe, to enjoy its quiet and rooms with dogs who drive me crazy and who also remind me to sometimes leave the house for a walk. Because honestly, if I have books and paper, I really can’t find much reason to leave. Especially when it rains.
As Porphyrus wrote: “A threshold is a sacred thing.”
The sound of rain on the roof brings a sense of intimacy, protection, shelter, and warmth. Gaston Bauchelard writes extensively on the space of a house as poetry in Poetics of Space. It’s a beautiful, heady read, an ode to the intimacy of both a house and of the poetry that arises out of daydreams, of solitude—of being able to catch echoes of past and future in enclosed solitary space, the poet able to catch the voice of those reverberations while enclosed in an attic room, a favorite nook.
But what struck me reading it after the rain had arrived, after the light tilted ever-so-slightly but much-more-noticeably into the stark light that shifts the shadows across the windows and presages fall, is how the act of enclosure—of being in a house alone, or in a space of uninterrupted solitude—can become an act of daydreaming, and how vital that act is—the space needed for imagination. He writes:
...By the swiftness of its actions, the imagination separates us from the past as well as from reality; it faces the future. ...If we cannot imagine, we cannot foresee.
I thought again of anchorites, rooted in place with visions of a world where all will be well. In the routine of an enclosed life—of what looks small from outside—perhaps they were working to create a future that the rest of society could never view in a linear pace towards an idea of progress. How perhaps those anchorites long ago knew what Jenny Odell writes of in the need to allow
…yourself to believe in another world while living in this one….
Bachelard also writes about the false duality of outside and inside, of how it sets up yet another binary that inherently holds an aggressiveness, an opposition that is false:
…you feel the full significance of this myth of outside and inside in alienation, which is founded on these two terms. Beyond what is expressed in their formal opposition lie alienation and hostility between the two.
It’s within that duality, of outside and inside, that creates that alienation of our own lives as separate from that of ‘nature,’ of a threshold that can never be crossed, only examined, between that of our own identity and that of the world without. Outside and inside, culture and nature, sustain the incessant myth of the lone individual in the ‘wilds,’—without a house—able to observe and write about the landscape, the object of a view, nature as an observed other. Outside and inside alienates us from those who live “outside,” in a nature that is supposedly separate from our life inside. I find myself agreeing with Bachelard when he writes,
A reminder of winter strengthens the happiness of inhabiting. In the reign of the imagination alone, a reminder of winter increases the house's value as a place to live in…
But it is also because of a feeling of affinity and immersion in what is around us, and the sense that we are indeed immersed, not separate, from the elements. We are lucky to have shelter and to feel the intimacy of being enclosed not as separate from, but as a part of the world. He goes on to write
The well-rooted house likes to have a branch that is sensitive to the wind, or an attic that can hear the rustle of leaves.
Yes—to be reminded that we are a part of the world, not separate—that being at home also has ways to break open time that a lone journey away cannot find.
Soto! Explore yourself! Therein thyself shalt find The "Undiscovered Continent"— No Settler had the Mind. — Emily Dickinson
Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense. Indeed, immensity is the movement of motionless man. It is one of the dynamic characteristics of quiet daydreaming.
Staying in place, we create and map interior wilds and the wilds of what is around us. Routines, place, and the quiet of solitude, are what break open infinity, an opening into circular time. They allow us to recognize and know our own inseparable nature from the seasons, the trees, the birds at our window, the tides of a wine-dark sea. Caravero writes:
On the contrary, by unraveling and thereby rendering futile what little [Penelope] has done, she weaves her impenetrable time. This extended intermission becomes an absolute time removed from history’s events.
The Greeks termed this the “standing now”—the eternal now that we can access when we are quiet, enclosed, comforted—when there is silence enough to hear the rain on the roof and daydream, to believe in a different world while we live in this one.
"Staying in place, we create and map interior wilds and the wilds of what is around us. Routines, place, and the quiet of solitude, are what break open infinity, an opening into circular time. They allow us to recognize and know our own inseparable nature from the seasons, the trees, the birds at our window, the tides of a wine-dark sea."
What a great way to end this fantastic essay, because that very thought is what was building in my mind. I've had to relent and put an AC unit in my window here in the room I work in at home (if I want to get any afternoon work done at all in the summer heat), and its disruption to my "world" is significant. There are entire universes accessible to me from this spot, and the familiar paths I walk in my wider physical world are always new to me.
This was beautifully written on a topic that I strongly resonate with. “Stasis” has indeed been unfairly regarded as a sense reluctance to explore new things. I suspect this misconception is in part driven by the cult of productivity and busyness, to keep moving regardless of how counterintuitive this is.