Forcing Home

I’m sitting in my childhood bedroom – albeit, it’s in an entirely different arrangement than it was when I was a kid (unnecessary aside: I’ve finally, after all of these years, begun to refer to myself as a man, rather than as some wandering kid). Today, this room is set up more as a cozy office than a bedroom, with a nicely made mattress on a boxspring on the floor, off in the corner of the room, next to a floor lamp – an arrangement seemingly made as an afterthought.

I’m in a clear headspace, and I’m calm; a condition which I have not, in truth, experienced often throughout these past several months. Or really throughout the past year and a half, since I first moved my tiny house and life out to Loudonville, Ohio (or perhaps this has been the case for longer than I’m thinking). And those sparse, recent moments of clarity, often provided to me while venturing out onto the trails of the Mohican Wilderness, have seemingly lured me here, back to this bedroom.

My Uncle Denny died one year ago today, July 30. I don’t know why that is of any significance to the purpose of this blog post, but it is. And that nest of newborn birds that I had found tucked inside of the hitch of my trailer two days ago – the ones whose mother had abandoned them when I disturbed her nest in my preparations to tow the tiny house…the ones who, in spite of my efforts, are now surely dead – they’re tied to this post as well. As is the adolescent escapee rabbit, with the adorably big ears, which I finally had to abandon to the vineyard I was living on, as she was far too smart and too fast to catch in a net or a trap. I don’t know why these events are significant to this moment in my life. But they are.

Last night, at 11:15 pm, my 1995 pickup truck and I rumbled into my parents’ driveway, the bed brimming with plants, potted in plastic feed sacks. Potatoes needing to be harvested, strawberry plants, comfrey for the three bunnies that I have left, and a handful of tomato plants. I’d strapped them down and tucked them together the best I could to prevent a highway disaster, but she still looked like a dustbowl jalopy. My jalopy. This would conclude the final trip, the very last one. My storage unit in Loudonville, OH is now chock-full, patiently awaiting my next foray into domestic life. The tiny house has been moved to an RV storage facility, where I intend to list it for sale and show it to potential buyers. And I am here, in my childhood room. At home.

It’s almost seven years since I stepped off of a sailboat, with a gnawing feeling growing in my heart, telling me that it would soon be time for me to die. Grim, I know, but please don’t be alarmed by this – the feeling was simply misread. A part of me was going to die, and it did. I reinvented my life when I got off of the boat, and headed inland to pursue a new, far more insidious, troublesome desire than that of the freedom offered by the road or the sea. The freedom-seeking, spiritually-guided, wandering mystic did die. But I sense now, these seven years later, that I’m in the process of reinventing myself, once again. I sense that some part of me is, again, going to die, though I’m not nearly as troubled by this as I was the last time. They say that humans do this every seven years – they uncover a new, yet untrodden path in their journey, and redefine their existence (if they allow themselves the freedom to do so). And I do see truth in this – though it tends to be more pronounced in individuals like myself (take that to mean whatever you will – crazy people, traveling people, millennials, hippies without a real purpose or job, yada yada).

I wouldn’t dare hazard a guess as to what the essence of this next chapter in my life might prove to be. But I’ll worry about that seven years from now. Today, I find myself trying to decide what I should entitle this past seven year chapter, which, as it would seem, is now in its epilogue. Seven years ago, I sold the boat for $2,000 (with the permission of the incredible man who gave it to me) and then bought a 2000 Fleetwood Prowler camper. I then began the process of dismantling it and repurposing its trailer as a custom tiny house on wheels. And everything in my life these past seven years, from early conception to finally living in the tiny house over this last, tumultuous year and a half, has revolved around this process – an attempt to fabricate a comfortable domestic life for myself.

“The Quest for Home.” That’s probably what I’d name the chapter. Or possibly, “Forcing Home to Happen.” Or, if I wanted to rip away the bandages and stare deeply into the seeping gash, I might call it, “The Lie That Ate My Prime.”

The word “home” seems to have, over this past seven year cycle, become indispensable to my vocabulary. I see now that everything which I have done in this period has centered around the goal of crafting a “home” for myself – a place that I could call my own, and within the safety of its walls, finally be authentic to myself. In this “home”, I could take pleasure in the mundane (to quote an earlier, more disjointed post), waking up to the blissful sounds of birds chirping, breezes blowing, and that overplayed flute song, Morning Mood, written by Edvard Grieg (you know the tune). In the morning hours within this “home”, I would sip coffee, watching the bunnies romp across the misty grass from my doorway, a tired smile on my face. I would get started early in my work – my life’s work – writing, crafting, building, or whatever the flavor of the day might be. I would have to work fast and strong, as I would be having company over to my home later that evening. My friends would eventually arrive for a cookout, next to a warm fire under the soft glow of the hanging lights. But my lack of time would be no problem. Within the secluded comfort of this “home”, I would have no trouble entering into a productive flow state, and would spend the next hours in a way that would bring me a sense of accomplishment and pride in what I had done with the little time that I did have.

And then, after my dinner guests had gone home and the drinks and the plates had been emptied and cleaned, I would take off the weight of the outside world and its distant mess, and place it at the door mat. I would stumble over to the mattress in the cool, candle-lit bedroom, and crawl under the covers, where she would be waiting for me, already fast asleep.

I am ready to rid myself of the rot that this word “home” has produced in my life. I walk down the halls of this lonely “home” that I have built, scraping thick layers of decay from the walls. I scoff at myself when I think of my own delusional aim to force a “home” into being – a place of permanence, safety, comfort and profound and lasting inner peace. Why not just force love to appear from thin air? Or community, kinship, and respect?

This childhood bedroom will be, for the next seven years, the closest that I will experience to a permanent “home” – and this I must now accept. To delay this acknowledgement is to risk much more than a few years of my time. I’ve fought so hard against the will of Life to artificially bring to life that which wasn’t meant to be, and in the process I have denied myself the liberty of confidently being that which I patently am. I am a finite being, actually aware of its own finite state of being. I am an anomaly – a creature, living in an exhaustible universe, blessed with an exceedingly rare gift: a chance to explore this fleeting moment of sentience, before returning to dust. I am an experiencer. A wanderer, a learner, a studier, a digester, and perhaps (one day, to some varying degree) a teacher.

In my quest to carve out a sense of permanent belonging and comfort – to build a hulking tiny house on wheels, and to move it to a piece of land where I could raise my cute little animals and my cute little garden, and form a perfect little life, replete with dinner guests and romance and an actualized sense of self – I willfully rejected the true nature of the creature known as Benjamin D’Amico. And that truth, for so long rejected, is that I am still on the same adventure that I began in 2015, the story for which this blog originally began. Actually, I am still on that same adventure, which began in the year 1991. And every destination that I have been to since then has been but an ephemeral stop on one singular adventure which has yet to conclude, and may never conclude at all (depending on your beliefs regarding the soul).

I find myself embittered by the idea of “home”, as I now recognize it to be dangerous. The act of seeking “home” can easily cause one to lose awareness of the impermanence of every situation. Having a home (a house) is all well and fine, but this “home” which I refer to is a very different thing within the mind. “Home”, as I would define it, is that holy place of impenetrable safety. It is the fortress to which we crawl when the arrows begin to fly, or upon returning from a journey, battered and worn. It is the place of comfort, serving as a punctuation mark to the hard day, the season, and the events that mark our journeys. No matter how harrowing the event, at least we can be sure that there is a warm fire, a warm pizza, a snug sofa, an adoring partner, an adoring pet, all waiting for us at “home”. And absent from within this fictitious fortress are all of the things which should remain outside of its walls, which might threaten our pristine comfort and sense of abject security –

– except for when they aren’t absent. The neighbor’s rooster, screeching horribly from sun up to sun down, seemingly for its own pleasure. And that spitting, cursing, screaming lard of a neighbor, who seems to have been programmed by God himself to ensure that no peaceful moment of yours outdoors will ever go without a certain level of disgust. Your cozy Netflix time being cut short when the internet goes out out. The mouse, skittering across the countertops. The dripping faucet.

Perhaps I’m the only one who does this, but I find that when I set out to craft a home for myself within a new space, it eventually inflates into far more than simply setting up a comfortable place for myself to eat, sleep and recoup. It turns into a bid for perfection – a perpetual war against that which does not fit into my view of what a true and lasting home should entail. No mice, no howling dogs, no hillbilly neighbors, no rot, no entropy…but like a failing floodgate, these disturbances do eventually begin to trickle in, through the front door and into my psyche. It takes time to notice the first drip. Sometimes months, sometimes weeks, but rarely so long as a year. I enjoy a period of appreciation, in which I blissfully soak in the novelty of my landscape, learning and growing as I do. But then, one day, that first drip does arrive. Cock-a-doodle-doo. And then the next. Hey neighbor! And then more and more, faster and faster they come trickling in. The cognitive dissonance begins to build pressure, until I finally become so enraged by my failure to replicate the safe, guarded space which I had in my head that I snap, and cry out, “This isn’t a fucking ‘home’! This isn’t my life! This isn’t what I wanted for myself when I came here! I’ve got to get out of here…I’m going to leave.”

And so, after much deliberation of course, I inevitably set myself a date of departure, with the clear understanding that this place is not the “home” that I was looking for. But then it happens – the peace sets in. At the precise moment in which I finally acknowledge that my stay in this place has a looming end date, a sense of home finally befalls me. I enjoy a nice campfire that night, both amused and bemused by the wild, soon-to-be-absent antics of my hillbilly neighbor. I tiredly smile to myself when I wake up at 4:15 a.m. to the shrill screech of a rooster, shattering the otherwise beautiful dawn chorus playing outside my open window. Making dinner in this space, eating, sleeping, working, playing, relaxing, waking up – these all become far more impactful, lasting moments, now that I can count the days until new memories will no longer be made here. The myriad of imperfections carved into this place – the dripping shower head, the unfinished fire ring, the weedy garden, the chipped window pane – all start to become perfections, with my daily recognition of them only proving to somehow highlight the beauty of these final moments. All because I have finally remembered that this is not my “home”. This is but a transient stop on a train ride that has yet to end. There will be no “home”, not for myself, not for a while. My time in that place (a tiny house on a farm, and then a vineyard, out in Loudonville, Ohio) was an opportunity to experience a small, weird and wonderful piece of life. It was a chance to soak up all of the new and the unexpected and the absurd for a brief window of time, up until the whistle would eventually blow, signaling to me that it was time to get back on the train, towards the next stop.

Why did I try to build a permanent “home” on that train platform? It was doomed to fail. It was asinine.

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As I said, the tiny house is in storage, and I intend to sell it. I don’t see myself in it, when I look at its perfect black lines, and chic lights and cabinets and angles, even though I built nearly every inch of it. I didn’t allow for enough mistakes in its construction. It belongs to someone else.

Likewise, most of the animals have new homes, save for Godric, Prince and April – three bunnies who I enjoy having in my life. And I am back with my parents. I intend to appreciate this stop. This is, after all, but a momentary layover on the Ben line; a chance to collect new lessons, memories and stories, in a new place and with new eyes, which might one day allow me to smile to myself as I sit on that train, heading somewhere new. No more fighting, I think. At least, not for now. No more clinging to this decaying dream of inner sanctums and perfection. I’ve grown tired of attempting to contrive hallowed ground from earthly terrain. All that I’ve ever managed to achieve was to sweep away that which might have eventually made my surroundings holy. I hope that I can go a few years without trying to force a “home”. Perhaps I’ll get to spend this next cycle embracing my true nature: traveling, scrounging, getting lost, getting found, seeing and feeling and touching, calling a tent or a car (or both) my home. Perhaps I’ll get to enjoy the ride for some time. Toot toot – all aboard.