A summer Saturday night — the shadows so still and lasting. Voices bouncing across a stretch of jade lawn before sneaking in through the screen door. A moment, a whisper really, when it seems life simply cannot get any better. When by innocently remarking on it is almost to lose it. But the utter sweetness surrounds you and you can’t help but keep on the lookout for more and more and more.
And then sometimes life seems to just as quickly linger at the outer edge of complexity. When it would be nice if someone could just dust off that magic wand and wave it over your head a few times to make even one single piece of the ridiculousness go right for a few hours.
The familiarity with these polarities stretches my humanness; both almost too much to take in the potency of their pure forms. And so I retreat to the middle; a place of repose and flow and safety. Prior to a friend sending me the link to the Elizabeth Gilbert talk about HOME this week I didn’t have a way to express this center place, this place of knowing and being that could not be misplaced by either “too good to be true” or “too bad to believe”.
Home. Where you are normal and reassured and regular– not by anyone else’s standards but by your own sense of personal center. “Your home is whatever you love in this world more than you love yourself” explains Ms. Gilbert “where you can dedicate your energies with such singular devotion that the ultimate results become inconsequential…as long as you never forget where you rightfully live.” Of course she is describing her writing as her “Home” but given my line of work, I have desperately fallen for the metaphor. Home.
Because I think this is what we build. Not only the Home where you rightfully live because around every corner is a reflection of your beauty and imagination, but a construction process that feels like Home. Where your sense of love is outside of yourself and that gives you courage to make decisions, to do extraordinary in the midst of ordinary, and to happily explore impossibility. It may be a staircase that will have to be dropped in with a crane or gaining head height in the basement of a 200 year old building on Beacon Hill. Perhaps it’s a rear yard addition in Cambridge without any of the neighbors ever knowing about it or laying out every single piece of salvaged flooring assuring that new is as authentically old as possible. And a process where you just know it’s right and you don’t feel bad or worried about any of it for a moment because what we are building is your Home.
This Home I speak of is meant to be your soul center, not some diluted, half minded attempt to minimize extremes and polarities. It’s the place you come back to when the good or the bad won’t be your ending definition. The place where you are most you.
And if we are building this Home for you, we better do so with singular devotion to you, not in spite of you…Because, well, building for you is our Home.
Thank you.
Allison
