Back to the Land

It was the ultimate Leave No Trace house, disappearing from the land without even a footprint. The last stage went fast- it only took two days to pull off the rim joists, to twist the beams away from their anchors, and then to simply lift the heavy square posts off of the rocks where they had been sitting for the past hundred years. The fat four inch nails let go with long, drawn out creaks and groans, but released their grip with surprising ease. It was so gentle and simple that it felt as if the house was rising into the air- evaporating like a fine mist into the light blue sky of the valley.

And now it is a piece of rocky land, shadowed by a giant douglas fir, with the stump of a brick chimney squatting on the sidelines. Even though that little piece of earth hadn’t seen the sun for all those years, it received it as naturally as if it had just been one long night of darkness. Already the fir has dropped a layer of needles and cones on the bare earth, and the rocks that had been trapped in the two-foot crawlspace are now being walked on by upright humans and sniffing dogs.

A house is something that you expect to be solid, to exist forever, or at least to outlast your own relatively short-term life. Throughout the whole process, every time something changed we would experience an unsettling disorientation. When a wall dropped, rafters became exposed, or a hole appeared in the roof, we would do head-spinning double-takes as we reassessed the proportions of our changing little world. And when it disappeared completely, we couldn’t quite believe it was gone. It’s a lot like when someone dies- it takes time to remember that he won’t be walking in the door at three o’clock. Where did he go? What happened to our house????

I recently returned from a Zen retreat, which involves whole days of sitting in silence, observing the rising and falling of sense perceptions, the thoughts that follow, and the stories and identities we make from those thoughts. It becomes clear that none of these thoughts about who I am, is really who I am. One by one we toss out the identifications, realizing that each has no real substance, no ultimate reality. And in rare moments, we touch something that IS solid- the space in which it all arises.

In the same way, there was no one element that defined the house, and nothing that securely held it together. The pieces fell apart like they had been just waiting to drop. In some places, rotten posts were balanced on rotten floorboards, held there only by the attachments of everything around them. Without its roof, it was still the house. Without the floor, it was still the house. Even with just a few beams left, it was still the house. Like the movie we saw last night about a guy in a coma- even with nothing left, as long as he was breathing, he was there. Until he was gone.

What I’m trying to get at in this terribly profound little story is that the very things we think are solid and permanent, like ourselves, and houses, aren’t. We give names to collections of thoughts and habits, and call them people. We give the name ‘house’ to a collection of lumber and nails that surrounds a section of air. And now the same little piece of air that used to be defined by its surrounding walls and roof and floor, our ‘house’, is still the same space, the same air, but undefined by boundaries. Perhaps it’s the same with us.

Soon we will begin the process of enclosing that space again, building a structure that we will once again call house. But having seen the open space in which it will arise, something is different. The illusion of permanence has been cracked. And although we will still call it house, and rely on its solid nature, we will also know that someday, this too will leave without a trace.