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A Word: Pictures, Sounds, & Stories. 001.

At Growing Home, we listen to our pain, its echoes, the silence of after It happened—whatever It may be.

If you have a Before and an After, an It you are trying to understand—I invite you to take a seat with us.

WELCOME

to a sanctuary for those who suffer

my picture of “home”—once upon a time

Introduction: May I have A Word?

Q, who is three, is drawing letters in the air. Often, she also demonstrates our examples of the letters. M for Monkey, O for Octopus, H for Horse. We connect the letter to a thing that makes sense (as in, the senses) to her. This preschool process reflects how humans first wrote the world down. In conversation for the On Being podcast, James Birdle and Krista Tippett explore the predecessors of written letters: pictures of animals.

• A, or aleph — a bull’s head

• Q — the tail of a monkey

• M — mim, a word for water, a picture of waves

• O — an eye, oculus.

Later phonetic alphabets turned these pictures into letters, which symbolized the sounds, which composed words. Stringing together pictures and letters and sounds, we sang our story—a song of survival.

But underneath this story, the sounds and the letters and the pictures, lives the thing. Bull. Monkey. Water. Eye.

Every word, therefore, can be onomatopoeia—a stand-in for a specific sound, yes, but also an artifact of survival. A name for a shared experience. A placeholder for what we cannot express. A silence.

Faith traditions honor this silence through spiritual practices, Birdle and Tippett note. They “point to the unspeakable.” Once a month at Growing Home, we will let one word point to the unspeakable. We will spend time with its pictures, its sounds, the story it might be telling.

The following week, we will grow this practice of listening by opening up to Some Sentences.

But today, let’s sit with “Home.”

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Having a home is one of my primal desires. I want roots. A safe place. A constant place. But I’ve lived in six houses in less than five years. Home evolves. Home is evolving. Like this space, Growing Home. To better define our work here, I wanted to start our word studies with “Home.”

Home—what do you have to say?

We start with its pictures.

I. The Pictures

What do you see?

What shapes? What words within the word? Any movements, characters, tension?

I see:

• a hole, in the middle but not quite centered

• “ME”

• on the left, a sturdy little structure with both feet on the ground, both hands lifted to the heavens

Do you see something else? If you’d like, share your observations in the comments.

II. The Sounds

HOME

HOME

HOME

When you read “home,” what sounds do you hear?

Hu - ome.

Relief. It sounds like relief, to me. Arrival. Survival—like I’ve survived one more day. I’ve made it. Home. A sigh.

First, the hard and heavy hu-. Rough-edged, it feels like some sort of burden. But following that burden, you slide right in to -ome. A settling. A rest. A I have both feet on the ground and I am here. I am hearing. Perhaps, you slide right in to home?

What other observations can you make of the sounds? Add them to your comment, if you’d like.

III. The Story

How might these pictures in the word and sounds from the word inform our definition of the word?

After writing the first two parts, I couldn’t quite find a definition for “home.” But I kept listening, kept looking, kept sitting to the silence. Finally, I realized: the sounds are like breath, the images are the home.

• hu - inhale - ome - exhale

• O—a hole in the middle, an emptiness—

• flanked by H—a sturdy structure—

• & ME—a person, personality, speaker, myself, the selves I am/have been/will be…

At the center of my questions lies an emptiness no work of mine can fill. But, here is also a home—a place to be.

As I search, when I listen, the word embodies what I seek: a breath, a place to be.

Not essentially stable (like I want it to be) but always available. More than that—“home” is where I always am. I am always moving. Through the air, the air I breathe, through questions I cannot answer. Through home. Through me.

I am home.

What you see and hear, how you define the word, can and should differ from me. You might not even understand everything I’m trying to say. That’s okay. I probably don’t completely understand it either! The point is, I am saying it. I am trying. I am working it out and you get to watch.

And now, I get to listen. What do you see? hear? and, how do you define “home” through these observations?

To come up with an answer, you may need a couple days. Take as long as you need. I will be here, sitting in the silence. Listening for your voice. Waiting with the word. Until then—

Take care.

CJS

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Thanks for listening with me.

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