Inhabit: Inspiration

When I turned 40 a little less than three years ago, I didn’t wake up on my birthday with a full-on midlife crisis. The closest I came to it was getting a pricey dye job at the salon to cover my gray streaks. (This was an act totally out of character for me. I don't wear makeup and rarely even blowdry my hair, let alone style it.) I even got a little cocky, thinking, Hey, turning 40 isn’t so tough. What’s the big fuss? Turns out I’m just a little slow. It took a good two years for it to sink in that I was right in the middle of a midlife crisis. I finally tuned in to what my body—my stomach most loudly (gurgle, gurgle), but also my joints—had been shouting: This is not the way you’re going to make it through another 40 years.

So, here I am, at almost 43, finding myself in definite need of some emotional and spiritual resources to help that body along. Yes, I’m as shocked as those who know me--raised Catholic but now avowedly agnostic--to find myself on a spiritual quest.

In my usual fashion I’ve been tackling the emotional and spiritual stuff haphazardly. I’m seeing a therapist, which is good. I’m digging into my memories and writing about my past. Another good practice. I’m walking just about every day. Yay, me; it’s my great joy. I’m trying to hold on to the Zencrafting blog and all that it represents for me.

And I’ve been reading some juicy memoirs (I’m not much on self-help books, though there are some exceptions). The “Inhabit” collage above was inspired by Already Home; A Topography of Spirit and Place, by Barbara Gates. In this spiritual memoir, Gates chronicles her quest to get to know the place she lives: the Ocean View neighborhood of Berkeley, California. “To know my home,” Gates writes, “I want to learn to inhabit the fundamentals—the creeks, the Bay, the air, the sand, the dirt. But it is indeed a challenge to recover this intimacy here in Ocean View, where it feels like the very terrain has lost contact with itself: the Bay clogged by landfill, the creeks culverted, the air fouled, the sand sold, and the dirt paved.”

Through daily walks with her dog Cleo, Gates tackles her fear of the unknown and explores her neighborhood, coming into direct contact with her human, animal, and natural neighbors. It’s everyday stuff, but Gates explores it all with ferocious depth and makes surprising connections between the mundane and her spiritual life.

Early on in her narrative, Gates latches onto the word “inhabit.” It represents her need to come to terms with the grittiness of her neighborhood, of her life. Just like her historical research into the inhabitants of her house or her archaeological reading on the early Native Americans who inhabited a vast shellmound on the shores of the San Francisco Bay, Gates traces the history of the word itself, ultimately locating its root in the Indo-European word for “take.” Tracing this root down through time, she finds that the word morphs into the Sanskrit word for “hand” and divides into two complimentary strands: to take and to receive. “When I think of inhabit in this way, about home, it feels like there’s only relationship: give as receive, receive as give,” she writes. Later she realizes that “through ongoing giving and receiving [with her family, neighbors, and wider community], I inhabit what is beginning to feel more like home.”

Gates’s quest to know her home is at once historical, geological, and ecological (“I think of home in grand dimensions—through vast space and geologic time.”), but it is fundamentally a personal spiritual quest in which she acquaints herself with . . . no surprise, herself. In the end, she concludes that this exploration of home has uncovered what has been inside of her all along:

“Unaccountably, I am filled with a sense of completeness, that for this moment, nothing else is needed. What is here feels like fundamental ground—wide and peaceful. Deeply familiar. I recognize it as home. . . . All the while I’ve been right in this place with that stillness, a hidden possibility, here all along. I was already home.”

In the “Inhabit” collage I’ve tried to bring in some of Gates’s extended meditation on the word: her realization that being grounded in a place involves a vast web of connections and entails ongoing acts of reciprocity (the hand that joyfully gives and receives). The daily work of fully inhabiting a place, a body, a self--with true understanding--becomes a loving foundation and source of support, just as a dwelling serves as a refuge from the elements. I’m trying to embrace this sense of inhabit, especially for my own body. I want to inhabit it fully, to be aware of its needs and support it so that it can do its daily work of being a mom, a wife, a writer, an editor, a volunteer, and whatever other roles this life calls on me to take on. More than that, I want to fully inhabit these roles. I want to joyfully take part in life’s give and take, the holding of hands and the sharing of meals, of laughter, of stories, of learning, and of love.

BTW, as an aside, I learned from the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology that "enhabiten" is the archaic spelling of inhabit. I wondered where Liane came up with that clever name!