“Wherever you go next, visit homeland and let’s meet first.”
It was a comment from an old Turkish friend of mine who now lives in London. He and his partner left Ankara during the purges that took place after the coup in 2016. I remember it well. It was the same year I left my Mud Home on a mountain*.
If anyone could comment about the homeland, it would be my Turkish friends. They don’t fit the tabloid image many Europeans willingly swallow of immigrants. They’re highly educated, top of their respective fields, and reside in a very nice house in Highgate. It’s been eight years since I saw them. Eight years since we all left. When I visit them, perhaps there’ll be Turkish olives on the breakfast table and a glass of Turkish red tea? Yes, I’m being nostalgic. You see, ironically it was Turkey, not England, I saw as my homeland until 2016. I honestly thought I would die there. Everything can change in life though, eh?
Immigrants and the Homeland
Most of us who have become immigrants and wayfarers for whatever reason, have an ambiguous relationship to the homeland. It can become a romanticised Promised Land stranded in some impossible past, or a psychological life raft rescuing us from a sense of abandonment and exile, or… far more commonly than is reported, it can also be an anathema. Some of us harbour an aversion to our homelands. I’ve always been one of those.
I never felt an affinity to my culture or my country, but hey, 1970s Britain was a grim place harrowed by instant Smash potato, and terrible plumbing. The heavy steel skies, the put-up-and-shut-up, the Puritan work ethic, and a certain brutality of mindset that seemed to want to stamp on any delicate sprout of sensitivity— none of this nourished me in my youth. I’m always amazed when I hear people bemoaning the present and claiming that it was all so much better in the olden days. They definitely remember the 1970s differently from me, that’s all I can say.
Yet here I am. After a quarter of a century or more I’ve returned, even if temporarily, to the homeland. But as any former immigrant will attest, the homeland you return to is never the one you left. In my particular case that’s a very good job. In the Britain of the 21st century there are beavers, bog moss, and bison**, the men (and sometimes even the women) now cry, and much to the ire of the generation above me, the work ethic has gone the way of the Dimorphodon. I’m all for it myself!
The Alchemy of the River
I was walking the river trail in the comely town of Wivenhoe, where I grew up. The path meandered past marshland and fields, always to the sound of seagulls. Waders, sandpipers, and the odd dunlin trod the mud flats in search of worms, crabs, and other submerged goodies, while the sun cut a surprisingly warm trail of its own. It turned the river into gently rippling foil and the mud into gold. Here I was again, at a seasoned 52 years old. How little this view had changed on the surface, yet how different it felt. This wasn’t a homecoming. It was as though I was seeing it for the first time. And in a manner of speaking, I suppose I was.
I walked and walked until I reached the woodland where the great oaks turned the air dark and musty. I found a secret enclave, a pool of sand that stretched down to the widening river. Hazels and willows jutted up, seemingly unbothered by the brackish water. Sitting on a broken log, I let the lapping river have her say. The seabirds, the sunlight, the river and the mud formed a type of multidimensional poem. It was an alchemy of air, fire, water, and earth, and I was the fifth element. Yes me, not Leeloo the alien from the Luc Besson film. Because the fifth element is the human, the part of Gaia that can marry the physical and imaginal, the emotional and the energetic, and birth reality from them.
It was there by the river that I remembered what the homeland really was. It’s not a location. It’s not the country we were born in, nor some distant dreamland we’re searching for. The homeland is something we carry wherever we go. It’s a solid stretch of inner ground that the feet of our soul are always standing upon, and when we’ve rediscovered it, the planet is born anew.
When I left my barn in Spain this January for the very last time, it would have been easy to start frantically looking for the next homeland, and embark on yet another quest. It’s what many expect me to do, after all. When I speak to people, they often blurt out where they think I’m headed next. Some are sure I’m off to Portugal, others have jumped to a conclusion that it’s Greece, yet others think I’m going back to Turkey, and then there’s a cohort that thinks I’ll settle down in England. Me? I don’t feel a desperate need to find a new homeland right now, because I already have one. And it’s a good feeling actually.
This past month I’ve loved the great oak in my dad’s garden just as much as I loved my ash trees in Asturias, or Grandmother Olive in Turkey. A blue tit gang twitter to me every morning here, despite my dad saying there are no blue tits because the jays attack them. Those little coloured birds hop about the oak branches with such enthusiasm, it generates a deep love inside me. As soon as I sit beneath the oak tree, any dissatisfaction evaporates and I feel grounded and whole. Yeees, I think I’ve got the hang of Earth Whispering now.
The Value of Our Lands
Don’t get me wrong; I still believe becoming guardian to a piece of land is the most powerful and transformative thing a human can do, far more important and healthier than producing some new-fangled thought system to “save” the goddamn world. More crucial than building mud houses too. It’s an initiation. A rite of passage, and a means of uncovering the mystery and magic of our lives. Leaving the human world behind and setting up camp in a Turkish field all those years ago was the most valuable thing I did in my entire life. It was the true homecoming. But once you’re home, you don’t keep trying to find it. You explore it.
By the time I walked back along the river path, the sinking sun had turned copper. Familiar structures came into view: the flood barrier, the shipyard, the sailing club. At the time I was born, the flood barrier didn’t exist, nor did the modern incarnation of the sailing club building, and the shipyard was in a sad, rusty state of dilapidation. I remember the beating of chests and the wailing of the malcontents when those places transitioned into their current forms. “Things will never be the same!” they said.
These days change is as politcally charged as freedom (probably it always was). Some change is obviously detrimental, and brought about with little care for or connection to life on Earth. Other change arrives all squeaky and shiny, but on closer inspection doesn’t live up to the claims on the tin, or drags a smog of negative side effects behind it. But the benchmark can’t simply be whether something is changing or not, because everything always is.
Things have never been the same as they were before, and they never will be the same again. There is no homeland of the past on the physical plane, other than in our very subjective memories. As I cruise through my fifth decade in and on and with this planet, I see I’m now bridging “youth” and “elder”. Just like everything else, I am transitioning, and the ‘me’ I remember isn’t the ‘me’ I currently am. Is that so bad? Rather than clinging to some plastic-coated image from five or ten years ago, I want to wallow in the real homeland of life a little, and celebrate my state of flux and the powerful evolution it can bring forth.
Relevant Links:
*Not only a Mud Home: https://www.themudhome.com/mud-mountain/archives/11-2016
**Some of the animals reintroduced into the UK since the 1970s that are now thriving: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/31/new-species-to-look-out-for-in-the-uk-in-2022-aoe
You always write with so much depth, clarity and beauty so that it feels strange to say that any article could be exceptional --- they all are! --- and yet this one is to me. I live in the US and have struggled for decades with the love of land vs the strong distaste and harm of the overculture.
Enjoyed this piece a lot. It sparked many synchronous waves of recognition. Strange to contemplate you back her- even temporarily- your rooting(s), embedding, and creations elsewhere seemed just as immovable as that oak. In the end home is a state of mind, that wonderfully resonates with a change in place, but unpredictably!