To Dwell on What Remains
It used to be something I avoided. “Don’t dwell on things…” my Mom used to say as if it was taboo, a bad habit. It was the natural follow up to her primary tag line, “I already did that!” This was even an acronym she had carved in hieroglyphs and put on a solid gold cartouche pendant she had made in Egypt and regularly wore around her neck: I. A. D. T. — I ALREADY DID THAT.
She didn’t want to repeat things, revisit things, re-do things or remain with things even her own body, which is why she chose to leave it at age 65. She wanted to get things done, get them over with, get on with it, not dwell. This etched in me a habit of always moving ahead, looking into the future, to the bright side of things, and to being a perpetual optimist that could make any situation work, even the ones that shouldn’t go on working. It’s been a useful skill, I’ll admit. It’s gotten me to and through a lot of things. But I now see it really is a habit of looking for home. A safe space to be, to belong, to dwell.
The truth is I want to dwell. I am a dweller.
The history of this word mirrors my own path. In Old English it originally meant, “to confuse” or “lead astray.” I’ve spent a lot of time confused about who I am, and I’ve been repeatedly been led astray by a belief that I am not good enough and that there is a “right” way to do things that I can’t seem to figure out because I am never arriving at the place I expected to be, a place that isn’t even real, or clear to me. By the end of the Old English period, dwell shifted to mean, “hinder or delay.” I’ve delayed my own belonging and arrival attempting to get somewhere. And now, I’ve finally come to arrive at dwell’s most recent meaning, “to linger” and to “make one’s home in a place.”
I am making a home in the place of body. The place of my life. This means choosing to dwell in all that I have been afraid to fully inhabit. It means going deep into the root of words, or my backyard looking for fossil rocks, or my own eyes by gazing into them in the bathroom mirror, all the things I did as a kid, before I was trying to get somewhere. It means some things I’ve already done are worth doing again. It means revisiting things over again so that I may never assume to know them. For when you know something or someone you loose sight of them. You lose your ability to see the constant changing mystery. You exile yourself from the place of the unknowable that inhabits all things.
It means I will remain for a time…in the vast room of this dwelling…
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