And Jesus said to him, Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. Mathew 8:20

Childhood is…

Ice cream in the summer. That annoying k-i-s-s-i-n-g song passed on from kid to kid through decades and generations. Sprinklers. The excitement of the first and last day of school. Best friends and heartbreak and forgiveness and the astonishing speed with which emotional weather patterns move through little people. Balloons. Birthday parties. Sleepovers. And for me, paper fortune tellers. 

Yesterday Grace presented me with one of these origami contraptions. “Pick one,” she said. 

“Blue,” I responded and watched as Grace’s fingers opened and closed the folded paper.  “Two,” I said. Then, “Eight.”

Grace unfolded the white flap and read, “You will be home lis.” I laughed out loud. 

“God I hope so.” She looked up at me with a perplexed expression. “Why is being homeless so funny, Momma?” Which made me laugh harder. “Go again,” she said. 

I picked orange, five and then seven. “You will have 100 kids,” she said. 

“That’s a lot of kids for a homeless person,” I was laughing again and Grace wandered away to find Kalvin.

We define home as so many things. For most people, it is the physical structure in which we live. For many, it is the body which houses the soul. For others, home is defined by their relationships to family and friends. But for just about everyone, home is also a carefully constructed, maintained, manicured and defended self-concept, onto which we project our consciousness and call it ourselves. Home. 

To back up a bit, this is what I think happens. When we take form, the soul forgets what it is in a cosmic amnesia that makes God’s Lila possible. We feel lost, so we identify with what we see instead of as consciousness itself. We identify with our blankie, hands, and parents; then friends, achievements, jobs, relationships, hopes, dreams, beliefs, philosophies, passions, and purpose. We spend a lifetime building and maintaining our identity as a safe and stable home in which our consciousness can rest. We redecorate our home with new beliefs and relationships and passions and purpose. We build better and bigger homes and identities, even spiritual ones, hoping they will provide sanctuary for us to know safety, peace and joy. 

But it doesn’t work. No matter how beautiful of a home we build in our psyche, we are formless. We cannot define nor find ourselves as the fluid thought and emotional patterns of the human we are watching. We are the experiencer. We are awareness itself, not what we are aware of. We are pure consciousness, not what we are conscious of. We messed it all up, didn’t we?  Betting our life on the artificial abode of the shifting psyche. And why? Why do we do that? It is our lost attempt to find and feel what we already are, Eternal Peace, Ever-New Joy, Love. It is one big absurd and exhausting trap that the more we cling to and believe in this home of identity, the more bound and lost we become. This world with its human was never meant to be used to define ourselves, it was meant to be entertainment. It is supposed to be fun. We got lost in the game itself and forgot we are the ones playing. 

That is why I laughed. Home lis sounds pretty good in comparison. But that’s a bit much to explain to my seven-year old. Hopefully I can live so that she’ll understand what it means to be free. And home lis. 

~

Let me be home lis. Free me from identification with this beautiful human through which I experience. Let me live in my true home in the unconditional merge. I bow to the merge, I bow to the merged. My offering is this: every home I have ever built. Amen.