Homeless
One of the unique and troubling challenges of being human is our separation from nature. We harbour this separation in our heads, hearts and souls — a quandary that has rendered us homeless in a most profound way.
Many of us have been physically separated too. For millennia, we’ve fled our families and homelands due to war, slavery, persecution, migration, disasters and the search for a better life. These experiences are rooted somewhere in our collective memory, and recorded examples go back as far as the Old Testament of the Bible.[i]
By contrast, people with a long intergenerational history of living securely in the land feel deeply at home.[ii]Crucially, these people know where the bones of their ancestors lie, and they have a profound sense of belonging to their forebears, to the plants and animals, and to the land, skies and waterways.[iii]
Before their culture was disrupted 250 years ago, scholars say Indigenous Australians lived this way for as long as 60,000 years. Their Dreaming mythology infused everything with sacred meaning.
When life is lived mythologically, there’s no separation between what we might see as mundane — chores, study, work, commuting, food preparation — and what we call sacred — prayer, sacrifice and worship.
For many indigenous people, mythology mirrors their deep feeling of belonging to nature: everything is sacred, especially hunting, gathering, storytelling, celebration and the initiations that inform their spiritual journey from birth to death.
Among the many tragedies perpetrated by disruption to indigenous cultures, perhaps the greatest was stealing and removing people from their homelands through the practice of slavery.
Of course, slavery inflicts many more wrongs — it denies people their liberty, their customs, their gods and their language, but its chief injury is to violate people’s feeling of belonging by stealing their sense of spiritual and cultural belonging.[iv]
Similar wounding has befallen people who’ve been forcibly removed from their land or who have fled in fear of persecution and death. Some immigrants and their descendants feel a similar deprivation even though they and their forebears weren’t stolen or fleeing from calamity.
In the United States, the southern and westward expansions of the frontier that began with the British colonial settlements of the early 17th century created opportunities for immigrants and pioneering settlers to stake their claim for a new home and a better life.
But going west didn’t mean they had any idea of how to be at home in their new environment. With their ancestors behind them in Europe or back in the newer colonial settlements to the east, these pioneering immigrants quickly became cultural orphans. They had no lineage, no elders and no mythology to ground them in the land.
What’s more, their loss was bought at the expense of indigenous people. Encouraged by a belief in ‘manifest destiny’ and the passing of laws such as the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the Indian Appropriations Act of 1851, the US Congress extinguished native title to land that enabled the forcible removal of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands to accommodate the European-American expansion west of the Mississippi River.
Indigenous people who agreed to assimilate into the new white culture were allowed to stay on their lands rather than being moved to reservations. But assimilation meant abandoning long-held stories and practices that ruptured their cultural identity. [v]
Anthropologists who study the impacts of human dislocation and ethnic cleansing say it takes just two generations to break the bonds that bind people to their ancestry and their sense of being at home.
‘The grandchildren, with no lived or recounted memory of any ancestral home, know nothing of Home — nor do they know that about themselves,’ writes Stephen Jenkinson. ‘They don’t know what the elders are talking about, if they are still talking about what was left behind, and they don’t often know much of the language the elders are speaking when they do. What the grandchildren know is flight.’[vi]
But those of us with the good fortune to have a house, a passport and citizenship of a nation-state are still cultural orphans with nothing and nobody to fill our longing for a spiritual home.
Yet home isn’t a place or psychologised state of being, even though the real estate and home decorating industries have convinced many that feeling homely signals the bliss of a spiritual home.
Nomadic people have no settled location. They move from place to place as a way of obtaining food, finding pasture for livestock and making a living. Their shelters are temporary, and their movement is guided by the seasons and the availability of plants, game and water. Today, some 30 to 40 million people are classed as nomads, drawing on traditions dating back as far as 8,500 BC.
With no fixed address, nomadic people bear their children and bury their dead by the trail. No headstones or cemeteries mark the whereabouts of their fallen ancestors.
But how is it possible to be at home with no fixed address? One clue lies in the relationship that nomads and some surviving indigenous peoples share with their ancestors. In these cultures, the dead feed the living. When grandpa dies, the tribe honours the old man with days of grieving and stories and songs and feasting.
The old man is present at his wake, propped in a makeshift chair or throne to hear the stories of his life — his achievements and failures. Everyone feasts on the marrow of his life and when the ceremonies are done, they put him in the ground and move on.
But he’s not gone or forsaken. Soon after he’s in the ground, the old man’s body starts to rot through the action of microbes in his body and the bacteria, fungi and worms in the soil. Within three years, his remains have put large quantities of carbon and nutrients into the soil, resulting in lush plant growth.[vii] [viii]
Meanwhile, the old man’s tribe continues its journey, always following the herd from pasture to pasture until they stop to settle on the best-eating grasslands, nourished by their fallen elders. All are fed by ancestry and all are nourished by the countless accretions of the dead: the soil, the pasture, the livestock and the tribe.
The wisdom here is that death doesn’t rupture relations between the living and the dead but, rather, affirms its necessity for life’s continuance and sustenance.[ix]
The dead aren’t gone, they’re present to the living through stories and customs and, most emphatically, as nourishment if we can appreciate and embrace the cycle of life and death. For those fortunate enough to know and hold their ancestors closely, the dead are never lost — they are destiny — and the living are always at home.
But for most of us there’s no balm for our loss and no liniment for our fear of dying and death. Without a spiritual home or a cultural context, we seem to be tearing at the world in a frenzied pursuit of what we’ve forgotten. And all the while we are turning the Earth into a smoking ruin — a stark reminder of our inner landscape.
We belong nowhere. We have no tribe, no elders and no ancestral story to bring us home. No wonder the news of our death has become an existential horror to us. But it wasn’t always so, and in some parts of the world it’s never been so.
Dan Gaffney is a teacher and author. His book and podcast series, ‘Journey Home — Essays on Living and Dying’ was published in 2019
[i] Thorpe, L (2012). A Study of Modern Day Slavery. International Disciples of Women’s Ministries of the Christian Church
[ii] Clarkson, L et al (1992). Our Responsibility to The Seventh Generation: Indigenous Peoples and Sustainable Development. International Institute for Sustainable Development, Winnipeg
[iii] Jenkinson, S (2018), Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble, North Atlantic Books. Kindle Edition, pp 204–205
[iv] Australian Human Rights Commission (1997). Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families
[v] T Egan, After Five Centuries, a Native American With Real Power, New York Times, 1 January 2021
[vi] Jenkinson, S (2014). Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul. North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, California, p250
[vii] Vass, A et al (1992). Time since death determinations of human cadavers using soil solution. Journal of Forensic Sciences, 37 (5), pp 1236–1253
[viii] Anderson B (2013). Dynamics of ninhydrin-reactive nitrogen and pH in grave soil during the extended postmortem interval. Journal of Forensic Science, Sept 58(5)
[ix] Oliver, M (2013). A Thousand Mornings, Penguin Books, pp27–28
