In his new collection of poems Wendell Berry writes:

However long I’ve stayed away,
coming home is resurrection. The man
who has been gone comes back to his place
as he would come naked and cold
into his own clothes. And they
are here, the known beloved family,
neighbors obliging and dear. The dead,
too, denying their graves, haunt
the places they were known in and knew,
field and barn, riverbank and woods.
The familiar animals all are here.
(Leavings, Berkeley, CA:
Counterpoint, 2010, p. 119)

My experience at Las Golondrinas these past almost eight years, experience sharing a country life with Scotties, donkeys, goats, sheep, and chickens, has deepened my awareness that home has little to do with real estate. Home has to do with the geography of the heart and the ecology of the heart has everything to do with relationships, but only indirectly with real estate.

That’s not to say ‘places’ don’t live in the heart. They do. “Places [the dead] were known in and knew, field and barn, riverbank and woods” take on unique identities by association with persons and animals we love. Such become holy impromptu memory gardens, deeply spiritual places of the heart. For example, I can’t now sit on my west patio under our long colonnaded porch watching a New Mexico sunset beyond our adobe wall without thinking of our late-Gus and Willie. I used to set them on top of that wall so they could see the world beyond. They loved life … and loved watching life in all its forms. That wall and sitting on top of it had more value to them than a king’s throne.

Similarly, I’ll never be able to see or think of our irrigation canal at Las Golondrinas that bisects our property without visualizing our Burnsie, our little inveterate ‘baptist.’ Sight of him, rat-like, wringing-wet, climbing up and out of that brown Rio Grande River water with a joyous expression on his face like a farm kid cooling off in a private swimming hole will forever ordain my muddy ditch as haloed ground.

While my feelings and attachments in my corner of the world are personal and non-transferable, they are not limited to me or this place. Places and habits of the heart can flourish in every person in every place. In fact, wilderness and every specially honored wild-place on our planet depends upon precisely such individual, local cultivation. Wilderness will never be safe in our culture until we learn to revere the holy in Cincinnati or Houston or East Los Angeles just as we see it and revere it in Yosemite. Unless all the earth is sacred, none of it truly is.

Berry writes:

… After
the brief cataclysm of “cheap”
oil and coal has long
passed, along with the global
economy, the global village,
the hoards who go everywhere
and live nowhere, after
the long relearnings, the long
suffering, the homecoming
that must follow, maybe
there will be a New World
of native communities again:
plants, animals, humans,
soils, stones, stories,
songs–all belonging
to such small, once known
and forgotten, officially unknown
and exploited, beautiful places
such as this, where despite
all we have done wrong
the golden light of October
falls through the turning leaves.

I’m finding rare joy in my life in belonging to my place, being owned by it so that “coming home is resurrection.” It fits my soul like coming naked and cold into my own clothes waiting for me draped and warmed beside a hearth fire.

Joseph Harvill, publisher Great Scots Magazine