Exodus
Do You Wonder How You Got Here?
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Home is not where you are born;
home is where all your attempts to escape ceaseNaguib Mahfouz
Autumn has arrived here in the north and some leaves on the Locusts and Walnuts outside my window have decided to fall much earlier than usual in this little corner of the world. We haven’t experienced a frost as of yet but it was an extremely wet summer here. The season of change has arrived. It is harvest time here. The colours are ready to explode soon. The birds are starting their migration south. An exodus.
Canada. This whole country outside of our indigenous people is a tapestry of immigrants. We are the sum of the parts as far as DNA goes. A spiralling helix fire born into naked mystery. Genes. Epigenetics. Carbon. Stardust. A story. The greatest story ever told. A cuoreodyssey far Beyond Ithaca. An exodus.
Canada. How did I get here? I was born here. Yet something deeper than bone softly whispers another song as the night slowly sings me to sleep. Home. Where is home? Greek and Celtic collide, connect and combine into a cascading song. What is home? A forest? A shore? A mountain? A prairie? A farm? A village? A city? A house? A land? To be from a place may not be the same as to be of a place.
If we were born here in Canada, most of us have come from the seed of a courageous soul who once ran from and through persecution, starvation or war. We have come from the seed of somebody who chose to create a new life in a brave new world. We have come from the seed of somebody who maybe had no choice but to get onto a boat to anywhere. Many of us disembedded in an exodus. Did we ever even arrive? We are the tapestry of words. We are the tapestry of stories. As Northrup Frye once said, the words we use are like the clothes we wear. Some stories have one foot in the new world and one in the old. Some of us are telling a story, others are being told. As the Greek poet Constantinos Cavafy wrote in his poem The City,
You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will pursue you. You’ll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighbourhoods, turn gray in the same houses.
You’ll always end up in this city.
Many of us are somehow are still searching -for home.
Exodus
Do you wonder how you got here?
The children of Achilles
Three thousand years five thousand miles
from Trebizond
Yet you were never there
in the crowded stench of the ships hold
Sea sick for weeks
Riding the swales between the storms
You never ran from the killing blades
or hid under the dead
Marched for months
past the protruding ribs of starvation
The rinds and peels the only meat
that bit into the fruit of onions
burning in your guts
Do you wonder how you got here?
Was there anything left to carry
beyond the tongue that soon forgot
your own name
Yet you were never there
What had to be left behind
doesn’t even want you anymore
She is not the same
She too had to survive
You looking backwards
Her just trying to look ahead
The harvest you hope to find
doesn’t grow
in the taste of her sounds- anymore
Do you wonder how you got here?
You have never let her go
The escape still pursues you
Yet you were never there
in the blight of famine ravaged Connacht
as cholera coughed
from the crowded boats to everywhere
Your bones still carry her song
Her story has become the skin
that wraps you in the exodus
of your own revelations
Did you write the story
or did it write you?
Do you tell the story
or does it tell you?
Do you wonder how you got here?
The same stories follow you
They are the clothes you wear
Inside of them you will grow old
Yet you were never there
when the blood of the Gaels was evicted
from the kilted hills of Eddrachillis
Even across all these mountains and oceans
You are chasing her
This thing called home
That time before memory
A place that you were not even born
A place that you won’t need to
search for- anymore
© Jamie Millard
Happy Autumn here in the north! Wether it is a journey of this life or lifetimes long may you always find your way home.
Thank you for being here.
The full audio podcast style can be found under the main title above.
Stay Well,
Lots of Love,
Jamie
This post ~ and especially the poem Exodus ~ hit home for me in so many ways.
Especially the poem punched me straight in the gut.
I grew up in the Holy Land, Palestine, Bethlehem (now officially Israel), spent most of my life in search of an 'elusive home', settled in various countries (or at least I tried), unsettled myself again and moved on. Took me a while to realise that 'wherever you go, you carry your own sky with you' (you might as well replace the word 'sky' with 'home').
In the wake of this realisation I gradually arrived in the harbour of understanding that home can only be found within. That's when the calls to explore the inner landscape set in.
"home is where all your attempts to escape cease". The words of Naguib Mahfouz sound to me like an old friend speaking (as a former student of Arabic, and translator of contemporary Arabic literature, Naguib sounds as familiar to me as Khalil Gibran, Rainer Maria Rilke, or the Brothers Grimm)
With "Exodus" you are stirring the familiar alchemical brew in a new way.
"Yet you were never there" you throw into the mix...
and continue, giving your reader new ingredients to contemplate...
"You are chasing her
This thing called home
That time before memory"
I can instantly feel new questions bubbling up as I'm reading.
I love the questions you are asking in the intro too.
Thank you Jamie 💗🙏 for this exceptional piece
An odyssey-exodus so well captured. And 'home' ... such an evocative idea, word and desire. Here, a week ago, our world was on fire. Now it's cloudy and raining. An odyssey of a different kind but house and quinta still standing means 'home' has once again blessed us. Not so lucky others who are now tasked with rebuilding homes.
"The escape still pursues you" is such a great line. Drama from the past (or maybe just memories from mundane events of the past) somehow play a role in bringing up the rear-guard, asking us to give them attention, recogniton, acceptance, and finally resolution and integration. Perhaps then they can 'find their home' into the present moment, rest, and trouble us no more.