― Hermann Hesse “Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.”

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree.

When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farm boy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.” ― Hermann Hesse

Dear nextsteps:

In your original post, April last year, almost a year ago, you wrote about your boyfriend: “he is lovely, kind and supportive…I KNOW my boyfriend is a lovely person and the life/home we have here is lovely, I just don’t FEEL it.”

Today you wrote about your boyfriend that he told you things like: “you look fat in those jeans don’t wear them… I don’t like flat shoes or buttons on clothes wear something else”, and “if he feels he is ‘right’ then no listening occurs. He will say things to put me down e.g. about attractive people where he works, about my weight, my lack of ambition in his eyes… it feels like I am living with a disapproving parent still. …Nothing is ever good. It always need improvement… he either criticizes me or doesn’t say anything much. He is on my side”

My input: he is on your side compared to a man who would criticize you and scream and yell at you, perhaps, on your side compared to someone worse? And he is “lovely, kind and supportive” from time to time, correct?

I wish your boyfriend was indeed lovely, kind and supportive and that your life with him was indeed lovely, as you presented it to be in April last year. I wish it was and you wish it too.

But reality doesn’t care for wishes. And so, you feel that you are “living with a disapproving parent still” because you are. Living with a disapproving man, that is. Like you wrote: “he sees me as a little girl”, inferior to him, one that needs correcting.

You want to feel at home someplace, like you did in those stables, and in that friendship. Unfortunately it is impossible when living “with a disapproving parent still”.

With a disapproving parent one is stuck trying to be safe, safe from criticism. Living in an ongoing danger of being criticized, being disapproved of, being treated as less-than, does not permit a person to … really live, to expand, to learn and heal.

I hope that one day you will find a home, a place where you will be treated as worthy, as an equal, accepted and encouraged to be more of your lovely self: the loveliness you seek, is it not in having another person see it in you, and encourage you to show more of it?

anita

Dear nextsteps:

You are welcome. We often need so much certain things to be true that we close our eyes to what doesn’t fit what we need and look  only at what appears to support what we need. Long term, we suffer unless we see reality as it is, all of it, “the good, the bad and the ugly”.

anita