The Messy Table has a new table. Heavy wood with solid legs and an extra leaf hidden away underneath, just waiting for our first expanded meal. Afar cry from our last table, a wobbly Ikea construction with matching wobbly chairs that came with the furnished apartment.
Our new table used to belong to friends who are also undertaking a big family move this summer. Their move is a little more extreme – off to Hong Kong where you just can’t take everything with you. So their table has a new home with us. In our new kitchen and new city to boot.
Our move went well and even smoothly, after the guinea pig turmoil was solved. A day on the train – much to the delight of the smallest of us who cradled his wooden railway crane under his arm most of the way – and then a long walk to the agent’s office for the house keys. Then home. A strange feeling, that. Finally arriving home to a place we’d never yet lived. But everyone agreed that it seemed like a good place to land.
Now we’ve been in the new house for a week and yes, of course, we’re still unpacking and setting up. Most of the books have moved into bookcases and the kitchen cupboards are full. The camping gear has a good home and some of the clothes are settled onto shelves and tucked away in drawers. There is still a lot to be done.
The kids are happy, but more than a little haywire. The adults, too, most probably. We’re all rollercoastering up and down – elated, exhausted, homesick and so ready for new to actually begin. We have a long standing bedtime routine with the kids of sharing our Good Things and Hard Things at the end of the day. (Thank you, good old Gracefield days for that Ignatian structure. Who knew it would be such a solid parenting tool?) It is a good reflective lens and it’s helped us to talk through a few of the struggles of arrival. Here are a few of mine in these early days in our new home.
Good Things: Newness. Beginning again. Blackberries growing in the backyard and the first pie we made. The real French creperie down the road. Space. The dishwasher we found in the kitchen. The light coming in through the kitchen windows. The small room at the end of the hall on the second floor – absolutely crammed with boxes right now and utterly inaccessible but when it is cleared, it will be my study. Most definitely a good thing.
Hard Things: The not-home-yetness of arrival. The kids’ moods – managing and meeting them with love is tiring. Tiredness, too, and the trail of things I didn’t do or haven’t yet done in the process of uprooting life in one place and replanting again somewhere unknown and new. No friends here yet.
When I was a student a dozen years ago, I participated in a retreat in daily life. My spiritual director was a marvellous elderly nun with whose beautiful, compassionate wisdom continually surprised me. She stressed the importance of finding a quiet space on a daily basis. A physical space could help immensely, but it wasn’t necessary. She also spoke of how a memory could do this work, too, if it were a strong and spacious one. A remembered place that you could step into. A sanctuary where you could simply be. This idea rang beautifully true for me, and I told her about an afternoon in the middle of a long canoe trip. I remembered sitting in the stern on a canoe in the middle of a wide lake, surrounded by ancient rounded hills, deep green with trees. Heavy dragonflies circled, and my paddle’s familiar weight pulled clean through the water. That is a place where I could linger long, wherever I am.
Since then, I’ve been collecting other sanctuaries. A clock tower in Spain, with bright evening light and laundry hanging in the arched windows. A Scottish beach where the wind never stops. And a painted chapel at the National Gallery in Ottawa where voices sing Tallis.
When I was in Ottawa in July, it was wonderful to really be in that room, to physically step into a place where I imaginatively linger. I was at the gallery with my parents and my children on one of those lucky, tiring sandwich days. We found a children’s art space called Artissimo where the kids could build castles and cities with wooden blocks, sketch and glue and explore the whole collection in amazingly child-friendly ways. Blue dug in and made himself completely at home. Plum loved the blocks and Beangirl, inspired by the concept of storyboard art, drew ridiculously funny comics. The grandparents left us to our devices and set off to the see the Janet Cardiff installation. After a while, my mum took a spell of child-minding and I joined my dad with the Tallis and Beangirl tagged along, too. We could hear the music from the children’s space, but stepping into the chapel itself felt like stepping into the music. Utterly surrounding. I turned to look at my dad and my daughter and they were each as captured by the space and the music as I was. Beangirl turned away to walk slowly, by herself, around the room, listening to each of the speakers in turn. As the individual voices take up their parts, one by one, you find yourself startled by music close beside one, one intimate voice in your ear suddenly stepping into the continuing, intertwining song.
My dad spoke softly. “I could spend a lifetime here.”
Yes. I could. And I do.
As with the other sanctuaries, I think that part of me is always there. I am present with that space, in that space. Memory works like that. That space is, for me, one place of awareness, of nourishment. Encounter, too, maybe. And just as we can remain present with these sanctuary space, so these places stay present with us, if we let them.
I wonder in this time of newness and this not-quite-landed feeling what spaces and sanctuaries I will find in this city.
