Thursday, May 13, 2010

Owning and Being: by Luanne Armstrong

Owning and Being Owned:

I am feeling a bit domesticated these days. My house is not really my house; it’s the farm-house and therefore, all kinds of people wander in and out on a daily basis. My family, my friends, visitors, and various dogs; many days, the teapot fills and empties and is filled again. So therefore, I feel it somewhat behooves me to keep the place at least minimally tidy and in working order; consequently I have new drapes, courtesy of my friend, Yvette, a new floor, courtesy of my brother and sister-in-law, and a new lawn mower, courtesy of my son. All a bit amazing to watch!
I have never been a house person. As a child, for me to be given a choice between being outdoors and in was no choice at all. I was almost always outside. The house was a place to eat and sleep and read. My mother looked after the house. Talk of decorating and renovating was an immediate excuse to flee.
But – I have this house. The house seems to always want things, drapes and flooring and cleaning and furniture. Occasionally, on my way home from buying groceries and chicken feed, I wander into the local hardware store and wander, lost and marveling, up and down the aisles. What a lot of stuff one can buy for a house. I stand, marveling, in front of the appliances, coffee maker, blenders and food processors. I can’t believe I am doing this. I hate stuff. I am an anti-consumer. But there I am, staring at stuff. The house is making me do it.
Louis, who is nine, is coming to the farm again for the summer. Lately, he has been talking about a TV show he watches, in which a group of kids are attempting to survive in the wilderness. We have decided we will play survivor on the beach this summer. At night, as he goes to sleep, we have conversations about what we can take with us. Are sleeping bags okay? Yes, he decides. Can I take my Swiss Army knife? A pot, teabags, salt and butter?
I know where this leads. I’ve packed up many a picnic for the beach. The amount of stuff needed to produce just one meal is formidable.
When I was a kid, I loved the idea of surviving outside. I had many and various hideouts on the mountain above the farm. Often, especially in the spring or fall, I would take some matches, a can of beans out of the pantry and my trusty hatchet, and head up there just for the sheer delight of making lunch on my own. There were two books in particular that I loved and read over and over; Two Little Savages, by Ernest Thompson Seton, and My Side of the Mountain, by Julie Craighead George, which were about kids who lived in the woods and did it well. I never quite lived outside, but I always liked to think that I could, if I had to.
But at sixty, a teacher and writer, I find myself stuck in the house far more than I would like. And I am completely amazed to find that I am actually learning to care for this house; learning how much time and energy and stuff it takes to keep a modern house functioning. And this isn’t a big middle class house. This is a small log house on a farm, with a woodstove.
And outside -- lawn, garden, mowing, pruning trimming. Yikes.

I have often said and it is true, that I belong to this place where I live, far more than it belongs to me. It has mothered and fathered me and made me what I am and for that, I am always utterly grateful. But belonging to a place, versus owning a place; belonging to a place versus being owned by a place; or being owned by possessions, being possessed by my sense of ownership, versus simply having enough things to function comfortably, are very, very different ideas and states of being.
I don’t want to own this place, but more than that, I don’t want my sense of connection to be transformed into one where the place owns me. It is a gift from fate that I have the chance to be here in this beauty; to share the gift of the non-human lives around me, to balance my choice to be here with the care that I give the house and the garden in order to maintain them in beauty as well. It’s an enormous and important distinction, a whole universe of value, between belonging, and owning.

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