The Home of the Sun and Moon

"I like our little town," said my youngest grandson in his little *going on four* voice, from his car seat as we drove up the road on the western ridge of the little valley we live in.

"Me too, buddy," I replied as we drove past an old dead cedar that had an eagle and two ravens sitting in it. They were overlooking the same valley as us. A light snow was falling.

Nobody in the family had ever referred to our place as a "town" before. But I liked that he said it, and liked even more how he said it; he said it like it was an immutable fact.

We call our little place in the valley Tyddyn yr Haul a'r Lleuad: Homestead of the Sun and Moon, loosely translated. The name is in Cymraeg, also known as Welsh. One of my daughters has painted a nice sign for our entrance, and lots of little signs for all around the little settlement in that language, too. This place of ours in the mountains owes its existence in part to a Welsh word and concept known as Hiraeth. Hiraeth is sometimes described as a longing for a place you have never been.

"GO BACK WHERE YOU CAME FROM!!!" We hear that shouted at us from time to time by people passing by, or when we are in the local regular towns. It doesn't happen often, but it is pretty unpleasant when it does. That is life; sometimes people are friendly, sometimes not. It wasn't always that way here, or at least maybe such behavior was less obvious. Nostalgia can be a heck of a drug.

Where I came from is literally 22 miles by road from where we have our little place. Going "back there" is something that happens when I need to go to the store or mail a package. In fact, prior to coming to this little valley a handful of years ago, we lived a scant 400 yards from where I came from and still had epithets hurled at us, although it really didn't get common until about a dozen years ago or so, or about two years after we returned to the region in general.

It is a beautiful place this area, with lots of history, great food sources, and it is at the crossroads of paths leading to other amazing places. It has clean air and water, wild country abounds... and the stars! Brilliant and bright! Lots of good folks of every kind here, if you are open to taking a chance. By and large, it is a decent if somewhat economically challenged place to go to ground, to put roots back down. Despite its warts - and there are more than a few - I can't condemn this amazing place and its inhabitants for them.

Hometown... I suppose that is a common enough thing for many. It is certainly a popular trope in film and media. And I know more than a few folks here in this area that have never even been to the next state, much less anywhere else, and for them "hometown" is an entire lifestyle. On the unfortunate side, this lack of travel shows more and more each year, proving Mark Twain to be correct in his assessment of the power of travel to broaden a person and reduce prejudices. On that side of things, I am glad for never really have had that one place that was my "hometown" place in such an absolute sense.

The flip side of that is not sharing the cultural commonality that many people are attached to or attracted by. I certainly had an origin place, and much of what I was exposed to was working class American normal, but new school and new house - over and over again - can make a person feel a smidge displaced. At one time I attributed my constant wanderlust, my caribou life to that displacement, but in time I knew that it was more than that. In time, I came to feel Hiraeth in my soul, deeply and painfully. I found that even when I "fit," I didn't fit.

We moved a lot growing up, and then when I grew up I moved and traveled more than a little myself. New place, have a few fights, try to adjust, eventually find some equilibrium, and then pull up stakes and move on. There was an excitement to it, and there was a frustration with it. The folks worked hard, and the experience really did build a character worth having. It was just different than what many had. As I look back, I wouldn't change it, but it did add to the ever present oddness of existence and being.

I came to describe myself with self-deprecating humor as someone who was raised by people who had a Volkswagon van and firearms, people who were scholarly yet savage, people who were practical but frivolous. There was much attention in my life towards technological and social progress advancement, yet there remained an emphasis on primitive skills and ancient ideas. Secular, yet spiritual. Serious but silly.

I was taught to look at the stars often, and in many different ways, ways both scientific and superstitious. What most saw as contradictions, I saw as the give and take, the balance of things, the eternally nuanced grey. I could never and still cannot subscribe to "all or nothing" ideologies.

All of it left me without a home. Sort of.

Everywhere was home, nowhere was home. Hiraeth built up inside me over and over again. I was a mountain man who loved to sail upon the ocean, a country boy that loved city nights, but not because I didn't like the mountains or the country; I loved those, too. I felt that a jock could be a thespian, that a nerd could be cool, that a bookworm could be a craftsman. Having no home meant having no limits. It took awhile, but the insistence of people who had never been anywhere - or known anything different - that there was something wrong with me because of my insistence on being everything I wanted to be faded, considerably.

Nevertheless, the Hiraeth raged inside me. The more I experienced, felt, learned, saw, and believed, the more I longed for a home I had never known, a home that may have been nothing but myth. I kept searching.

Married, children, career... art, research, exploration... and like the song says, "Some of it's magic, some of it's tragic, but I had a good life all the way." Huzzah! It was great, life was good, Hiraeth be damned!

But it was still there.

Years passed. My family and I returned to the region of my birth for the geographical and experiential opportunities it provided. It had changed some, a lot in some ways. Gone was the easy rural region where hippies and miners, ranchers and farmers managed to get along adequately. There were definite sides now, and by golly you better pick one! But as always, I remained impossible to define in any of the ways the slaves of identity insist you fit. When once being different had been okay - or at least minimally tolerated - it was now a bit of a problem with the most strident voices in every direction. What could I do? I - we - just kept on doing and being what we are, whatever that is. I for certain could still not choose a side under an absolute!

More explorations, more work, more art, more study. In time, we made the move to a stretch of virgin ground in a little valley on the slopes of a massive mountain, and from scratch began to build what would become Tyddyn yr Haul a'r Lleuad. There are stories about that, in fact a book or more's worth and that time will come...

But we are talking about my Hometown today. Our Hometown. I finally have one, here in this little valley on the mountain, this place we call Tyddyn yr Haul a'r Lleuad. And it is an extraordinary little place...

Supper last night was home-raised and butchered pork smoked with our applewood and finished with my best friend's homemade glaze, home-grown potatoes mashed with home-produced goat's milk, our heritage corn... Scratch baked apple pies made with our apple pie filling for dessert, baked in a wood-fired brick oven the kids and grandkids helped me build.

Breakfast today was more of that good pork put in a gravy over scratch-baked biscuits accompanied by eggs from our henhouse. The coming days... the meals will be similar in essence, with variety of content. But related.

I am writing this in a little cabin, sunlight streaming in from the solarium on the south end, a small wood fire in an old stove adds warmth. My old black dog Ruby is at my feet snoring, several cats are dozing here and there. I am surrounded by hundreds - thousands - of books of every age and on every subject. I have more, but they rest in storage until we get the library built.

Dozens of strands of antique beads from all over the world hang from the front of the shelves. Hats of fur, felt, straw and wool rest, waiting for their next adventure. Muskets and knives, hatchets and horns, bags and baskets, wool blankets and old trunks, gourds, drums, canteens, packs, and candles decorate this space. Bows and arrows, drafting and writing desks... sextant and compass... pipes and bosun whistle... linen, cotton, canvas, wool and braintan... buffalo robes, copper and tin kettles, cast iron...

There's my cane, next to my wood's belt with its pouches. Ruby is awake now, looking at me: she senses something about what is going on inside me as I write this. My wife's treadle sewing machine, and her hand-crank one, too. Bolts of fabric and skeins of yarn...

I can hear my donkey, Big Easy, braying at the other donkeys and mules. I look out the north window and I can see a couple of the big equines, Blackie and Maggie. And there is our small, earthen-floored workshop, filled with leather and antlers, copper, silver, and wood, candle-making materials and painters supplies... next to it the workshop are the forges and anvils, the stitching horse and grinders... waiting for my return, all of them.

Past that sits the tack shed and barn with grain and saddles, shovels and picks. Farther north, the Tavern we built for ourselves, and all of its treasures and warm revelry waiting, with its old piano that once lived in Carnegie Hall... and hundreds of tankards hung on hooks... and generations of ancestral accoutrements adorning its walls. Beyond that the homes of my grown children and their young families...

I can see the collection of old traps and axes hanging on the side of this cabin, and the wooden benches and the tables of its small garden. There, too, are old ships cables, weathered oars, and a brass bell at the door. Between the workshop and the horses are the rabbits, ducks, hogs, hens, and the goats... there are the turkeys, in their new pen north of the horses.

And there is our Temple, a circle like the ancients used, and so too the early years of the descendants of the Disciples... stone and elm. The young oak tree by the new crescent shaped stone planter we built last season is wintering well. All around the place there are little places to sit and learn, places to listen and be heard... or just be.

The hills and ridges around our valley meadows are covered in cedars, green in winter. To the west of the cabin our gardens and orchards, our vines and planters. Beyond... the stream, its rushes full of winter birds and deer. Overhead eagles and hawks and ravens... the brambles, roses, lilacs, and trumpet vines slumber until spring. The valley rises up to meet the mountains above... Tonight the owls will take flight, the weasels will scurry, and the coyotes will howl.

The sunlight feels warm. Ruby dog snuggles closer, comfortable that the wave of emotion going through me is joy. My Grandpa's mountain goat hide is there in front of me, my Grandma's hand drum hangs above my hand-built bed. Old trade cloth tapestries adorn walls and ceilings, and old rugs from many places cover the wood floor.

We run on solar power here, and have different sort of Internet connection than most. And as prepper or however it may sound, it just isn't. We just are not in that box, either. It is easy to define things by their most simple and convenient definitions; it is not always accurate. Our water is clean, our waste engineered proper. The buildings are snug, tight, efficient. "Waste not, want not" is one of our mottos. Reduce, reuse, repurpose, recycle... make do or do without!

We love movies, but do not have cable TV. We love music, all sorts of music, and everyone plays an instrument or six, and sings songs. We travel a lot when we can. That shop houses modern tools, too. That electric sewing machine sits right next to the antiques. My wife and I both still do some work in modern technological endeavors, and our children - and now our grandchildren - are learning cutting edge systems, too.

After all, why can't a young lady feed the rabbits, water the herbs, and then go work on her robotics project while listening to a playlist that includes everything from Pachelbel to Ice Cube? Why can't that same young lady use a compact tractor to move a hay bale before harnessing up a draft pony to go for a drive in a wagon with wooden-spoked wheels? Why can't a young gentleman take his wooden bow out for a trail course archery shoot before going to flying lessons, after his pottery class?

My life - our life - is so very little like those others in the world around us. Or what I thought my life would be back in the days when I thought normal was possibly a worthy aspiration. It is a goodness, this place. The difference is stark to some, and while such aesthetics are a warmth for me, I know too that they leave me in a cold isolation when it comes to fitting in. Is this isolation because of these aesthetics or are these aesthetics an expression of the isolation that is and will always be my essence? I deeply wonder if I were ever, or would ever be able to be otherwise. I ask myself what else I would want my life to look like, sound like, feel like, smell like, taste like... be like.

And it just ends up a variation on this homestead. Wherever or however I would have found or created my Hometown out of the need to fulfill my Hiraeth, I can't be anything else. I suppose I feel odd, and slightly defeated by that truth occasionally, when I ponder it...

But this is who I am, what I am, where I am, when I am, why I am, and how I am. I don't even think it is that I won't or wouldn't be otherwise... I don't know if I want to be otherwise. I don't think so. Whatever it is that many others are or want to be...

I am just not. For whatever reason, I will never be otherwise.

Ten thousand pictures could not describe my Hometown. Nor could I completely with infinite time and endless words. I just knew I didn't have one but needed one. So, I took the advice of Sir Ian Hacking, and when confronted by a paradox I came up with a new idea:

I wouldn't find my Hiraeth a home, I would give my Hiraeth a home. My Hiraeth turned out to be the beautiful people - my family -in my life. I can see that now, that without them, there would be no Hometown for me. I am glad there is one for them.