My friends at 350 Seattle have put together another fun and diverse collection of art and writing in this year’s Story Circle zine. Shoutout to Amanda (of eClips) and Emily (of The XYZ) for facilitating this slower-paced meaning-making space within the often hectic tumult of the climate movement.
This year’s issue centers on the theme of “home,” inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, which in recent years has become a central text for many folks trying to re-center their connection to land while remaining attentive to demands for decolonization.
I’ve got a little piece in there, which I’ve copied below, but you can also read the whole zine online. Collage art, short essays, erasure poems, recipes—it’s an eclectic set of reflections from people digging into the question of what it means to make or return home in a world torn asunder by natural and cultural forces.
Here’s all the info on last year’s issue, Elemental, to check out as well.
Thanks for reading Unsettling! Until next time,
Meg
“yes, my house is made from sil-nylon,” from Homeward
One spring, I set up my narrow one-person tent on the stony floor of a dry riverbed in southern Spain, the second evening out on a week-long backpacking trip. The night before I had slept in the open air, with only my mat and bag unrolled on the floor of some abandoned, unnamed cliffside ruins, what might have been an ancient farmhouse foundation slowly turning back into the mountain from whence it came. It seemed hard to beat the romance of “camping upon the ruins,” so I wasn’t prepared, on that second evening, for the rush of emotion that came as I pushed in the last aluminum stake. Yet as I stepped back and stared at the faded orange walls, my body flooded with warmth and affection. “Oh, hello, little house!” I said to my tent. I half wanted to hug it, awkward though that would have been.
In the months leading up to this, I had mostly slept on the couches of friends and in their spare rooms. For the extended holiday season, I had appropriated a room at my parents’ house, displacing a younger brother who graciously took to the sofa. I’d been in hostels and week-long apartment rentals and an occasional hotel room. And I’d spent nearly six delicious weeks sharing a bed with a new lover in their tiny studio cottage, before following through on prior travel plans, throwing things in a backpack and heading out of town once more. But despite the kindness and generosity received in so many of these places—even in the homes of those I loved and cared for—none elicited the exact feeling of joy that sprang up with the “pop” of those tent poles. My heart rose and opened up as I saw my tent take form, its thin frame embraced on either side by tall, fern-covered canyon walls. I had carried my little home day after day the year before, and it in turn held me night after night, through many months of hiking. Here we were again now, held once more by the hallowed earth, together listening to some local riverine gods whisper and flutter through the canyon leaves.
I subjected that tent to more than a few brutal windstorms on our excursions together, and a pole snapped at last a couple months after leaving Spain, on the last night of a trip circumnavigating Tahoma. I replaced the broken piece, then another one. The repairs started to mount, and by the next summer’s end I had to face up to the practicality of replacing the tent wholesale. But even with a new and roomier two-person tent in my possession, I never could find the heart to discard the first. One simply doesn’t throw away a *home*.
Which is what I think, now, each time someone’s colorful nylon shelter is torn down and tossed aside by both well-meaning and callous actors alike, who don’t know a home when they see one, and who go to shunt people into “housing”—that abstracted form of shelter—instead.
Four wood or concrete walls and a heavy roof may offer fewer drafts and the chance of a softer bed, but the felt sense of shelter comes in more varied shapes than the modernized mind and its accompanying institutions will generally allow. One can construct all the housing in the world and never make a home, which is a place where not just people but the memory of belonging dwells—of belonging to oneself and to the earth, as well as to others.
Such belonging is in part why what sometimes looks temporary to one person is, to another, their greatest thread of stability, or their strongest sense of home, thin walls or no. Permeability may even be part of the point: how else is one to listen to the midnight spirits dancing through the canyon ferns? Or to the city’s own whispered night music, its varied simultaneous rhythms of joy and danger and calm and change?
Every time I think back to that riverbed in southern Spain, I picture the white rocks of the dry river glittering under the dark sky, its stone walls reaching up to the stars; then I picture the shadow of the rainfly in the moonlight, and my own shadow out the open door. I remember again that it’s possible to feel truly grounded in what appears to others as only transience, and to feel most held by the frail and the invisible.
I remember as well that, sometimes, a tent really can be a home.