a place to call HOME

There’s a moment, walking between the apple trees and the wall of the red house, with these two brothers who were born here. One of them lifts the lid of the well and we peer down into the stone-walled water — and it hits me. We are not simply buying a property, we are taking custody of all this: the patch of land, the two houses on it, the trees and the well and the stories these men carry. With luck, with care, we may yet be grafting our own story onto these roots.

It happened like this.

One Friday, halfway through October, I was writing one of these occasional newsletters. I wrote about how to hold an intention, lightly and clearly, words shaped by these years of seeking a place to call HOME.

Meanwhile, in the next room, Anna was working from home. The property showed up in a new search she’d set up two nights earlier — if she hadn’t done that, we might have missed it, because it wasn’t an area where we had been looking. But something was wrong on the website: it said the viewing would be between midnight and midnight on the 31st of October. So she mailed the estate agent to ask what time it was meant to say, and he called straight back. Could we come and see it that Sunday?

Two days after we’d learned of its existence, we were being shown around, the only people there. Three days and we put in a bid for the asking price. Four days and the contract was signed. That’s how long it took from start to finish.

There was a grim half hour of sitting in the bank, while they tell me my income is so irregular they can’t make a loan on the basis of it, but thankfully Anna’s salary is enough for them to give us the mortgage we need.

That just underlines the narrowness of the thread on which such a moment hangs. If there had been an open viewing, the way things are just now, the price would likely have got away from us. If there hadn’t been a glitch in the website, Anna wouldn’t have contacted the estate agent.

And look at that glitch again: between midnight and midnight on the 31st of October, All Hallow’s Eve, Samhain, the threshold of the old year. The definition of the liminal. I’ve said it before, it’s best to treat such happenings as a joke the world joined in with — to get all serious about this stuff is to court madness — but it’s hard to slip the sense of some trickster energy at work in all of this.

So this is it, the place where we intend to settle and set ourselves up as a school called HOME. A school that starts from the conversations that go on around our kitchen table. A gathering place and a learning community for those who are drawn to the work of regrowing a living culture.

Two houses on a patch of land in the town of Östervåla, a small town thirty miles northwest of Uppsala, an hour from there by bus. There’s work ahead of us, getting to know this place and finding where we fit. Already, as we meet people, I’m struck by what it is to be arriving in a place that’s small enough that people have a stake in who you are, what you’re going to do with the old Lundqvist’s shoe shop — Sko’Lunkens! — on Åbyvägen.

The yellow house was built in 1912 for the town’s shoemaker. The ground floor served as Lundqvist’s Shoes until five years ago, when his grandson retired. It’s been in one family until now. We’ll live in the flat over the shop and the downstairs space will be the first home for the school.

Meanwhile, we’ll get to work on the red house that’s down the garden. Built in 1924, it’s been part living quarters, part laundry and part barn. There’s a wood-fired washtub in one of the downstairs rooms, two generations of counters from the shop with endless drawers, a table tennis table, a pair of antlers. We’ve said we’ll take the lot, whatever he doesn’t want, the junk and the treasure trove. The first phase of work will be as much archaeology as anything.

Upstairs, there’s a long, high-roofed, wood-timbered loft with a big south facing window that will make a great hall: a place for gatherings, talks, concerts and workshops.

There’s no end of work ahead, for sure, and before long we’ll know what kind of help to ask for. But the place feels right — and while there are never any guarantees, it is full of promise.

Sharing the news with friends over the past three weeks, I start out feeling a little awkward. There’s so much bad news around, so many people whose lives have been made harder by the events of this year, our own good fortune can feel embarrassing.

But there’s something more, here. I’ve said this before, too — the only reason we need more than a couple of rooms is to make a space of hospitality, a place where we can bring people together, a home where there’s always a spare seat at the table and a mattress that can be laid on the floor.

And at a moment when restrictions are tightening again, committing ourselves to this work feels like an act of faith. One small act of faith that a time is coming when it will be easier to cross borders and meet around tables than it is just now. When that time comes, many kinds of gathering space will be needed, and our work is to make this one of them.

We hope that many of you will find your way to our threshold in Östervåla in the years to come, but meanwhile I have some more immediate invitations.

On Thursday this week (12 Nov) at 20.15 CET, Anna and I will hold a free Zoom session for anyone who wants to learn a little more about our school. We’ll tell the story of the journey that led us to HOME and share some of our intentions for the years to come. You can read more and sign up for that session here.

This Sunday (15 Nov), our online series — Homeward Bound: The Climate Sessions — gets under way, when I’ll be hosting the storyteller, mythographer and wilderness rites of passage leader Dr Martin Shaw. Further guests over the weeks ahead will include Vanessa Andreotti, Alastair McIntosh, Ayşem Mert and Lucy Neal. There are still places available for that.

On Tuesday next week (17 Nov) — if you’ve not already had enough of me! — I’ll be holding an online workshop on the thinking of Ivan Illich and the ongoing relevance of his work. This is hosted by our friends at Stir to Action as part of their Beyond Here series and the workshop starts at 15.00 GMT / 16.00 CET. More details for that are here.

I talk some more about the path that led us to Östervåla, along with the aftermath of the US presidential election and many other themes, in the final episode of season two of The Great Humbling, which should be published sometime in the next day or so — you can find all the episodes here.

And finally, if you’d like to see a little more of the yellow house and the red house, the shoe shop and the great hall, then here they are.

Thanks to everyone who has supported us in different ways — through sharing the word, getting involved, or simply sending heartening replies to these newsletters — on the journey that has led us to HOME. I look forward to sharing the next stage of this journey with you.

Meanwhile, let me leave you for today with some words from Ivan Illich (brought to mind by C. M. Sacasas’s excellent newsletter, The Convivial Society):

I do think that if I had to choose one word to which hope can be tied it is hospitality. A practice of hospitality — recovering threshold, table, patience, listening, and from there generating seedbeds for virtue and friendship on the one hand — on the other hand radiating out for possible community, for rebirth of community.