Our alive, breathing world is always speaking. When we inhabit our interiors, our eyes, ears and hearts open to the voice of the world.
Home is mostly associated with the physical, architectural space that houses us, keeps us safe as we sleep, and nourishes our bodies. There is another essential understanding about that word, home. Our bodies are our primary home, housing our spirits, our energies; thoughts, and imagination. Our inner lives, the place we naturally inhabit when we are not navigating the external, exterior world, form a rich and wide conversation, connecting us to the physical world as well as the worlds of cultures and time. We might call these homes our inner caves. As a primary place where our imagination speaks directly with the physical world, we might also consider a garden to be a home, an extension of our physical selves.
Our presence in a garden is similar to entering the space of our imagination. Rebecca Solnit suggests that a garden is devoid of words. “A garden offers the opposite of the disembodied uncertainties of writing. It’s vivid to all the senses, it’s a space of bodily labor, of getting dirty in the best and most literal way, an opportunity to see immediate and unarguable effect… To spend time frequently with these direct experiences is clarifying, a way of stepping out of the whirlpools of words and the confusion they can whip up. In an age of lies and illusions, the garden is one way to ground yourself in the realm of the processes of growth and the passage of time, the rules of physics, meteorology, hydrology, and biology, and realms of the senses.” ( – Rebecca Solnit, in Orwell’s Roses, Viking Press, 2021.)
Wilken, 30″ diameter, mica with 23k gold on yupo mounted on panel, 2024.
As revolutionary research in the biological world piles up, our understanding of the natural world is shifting. We are beginning to understand the sentience of plants, the interconnectivity built into the plant kingdom. We are learning to listen to this sentience, and to understand its amplitude. As evidence accrues, it’s not a leap to realize that this interconnectivity is woven through, in, around and with us. It’s another modest step to understand that our bodily home is quite a bit bigger than we had previously thought. Loosening our certainties and convictions opens the door to these wider understandings of what home is.
If it isn’t apparent, this essay is an invitation to loosen our certainties, to relax our firm boundaries around concepts and ideas. Recently a new friend visited and brought a sumptuous, hand-made card. In it he thanked me for the gifts of our newly found friendship. The card was a physical manifestation of all the loveliest things we value about friendship: the trust, the delighting, the care and honoring that comes with deepening friendship. Perhaps this is another cornerstone of home: that ability to wrap ourselves in total trust. In a physical house, we trust the integrity of its construction, that the building will not collapse on us. We internalize the confidence this trust enables. Our friends are equal to our physical homes; they are the homes of our emotional, and spiritual well being.
The epoch of change that suffuses our world, and washes through our homes, carries an invitation for our imaginations. Here, the words of contemporary composer and musician, Sami Yusef, offer a clarity of understanding this expanded idea of home:
The inner journey is above the sky.
The journey of the body falls on dry land.
But the journey of the spirit sets foot in the heart of the sea.
Even stones take my hand. – Sami Yusuf
Signs and guides are all around us. We may not need thousands of square footages of physical space for home to become that thing that glistens, welcomes, offers refuge, and refreshes us. We might enter the space of a stone and realize a palace of light.
Let go of certainty. Let go of the delusion of self-centered authenticity. Let your home become expansive.
Karen Fitzgerald was born and raised on a dairy farm in the Midwest. It is this early, close relationship with the natural world that informs her work. She has an active exhibition history in the US and abroad. The Queens Community Arts Fund, Women’s Studio Workshop, and NYFA Artist Corps have supported her work. The work is in private, public, and museum collections. Heavily influenced by poetry, her work delights in the energy of gardens, mysteries and all things invisible.
