Dear Reader,
Welcome.
Our title, “Homewords,” is a translation into Anglo-Saxon English of the Greek-derived “ecology” (from oikos, home; and logos, speech, reason, word). Our subject is “home” in the widest possible sense of that extremely pregnant term, and our words are put at the service of this theme. Our trajectory is radial, outward and inward, from the soil of rural Vermont where we put our feet down each morning, to the lives of peasants, poets, philosophers, artisans, and artists in far away lands, and back again to lay down our weary heads like Odysseus on the sands of Ithaca.
“This world is not my home / I’m just a-passing through…” So runs the old Protestant hymn, preaching both true and false doctrine. As spiritual beings with material bodies, half of us belongs to the world of the angels, half to that of beasts, birds, plants, and stones. The old hymn recognizes our alienation from this sublunary frame of death, decay, and destruction, but ignores the first two imperatives which God gave to Adam in the garden, to tend growing things and to name the beasts. Both tasks outline the human vocation: to return every creature as a gift to the divine archetype of which it is a time-bound, material instance; to bring down to earth the things of heaven, to raise heavenward the things of earth.
Sicut in cælo, et in terra — “on earth, as it is in heaven.” Our task is one of home-making, eco-poiēsis (poiēsis, making, doing, crafting, creating). No small task, that, despite the fact that it is too often, in Ivan Illich’s phrase, “shadow work.” One understands what is not encompassed in the task of home-making: neither the race to abandon earth for heavenly realms in a spiritual sprint towards bliss, nor Elon Musk’s cruder vision of escape for the sake of interplanetary colonization.
What is more difficult to convey in a pithy phrase is the positive definition of what it means to make the earth our home. There is a clue, it seems, in reversing the process of translation we undertook in the beginning, to go from Anglo-Saxon to Greek, home-making to eco-poiēsis. Another version of this term would be eco-poetics, which indicates that home-making might include the exalted as well as the humble, the fine as well as the domestic arts. Wood-working, portrait painting, folk music, pottery, lyric poetry, bread-baking, mead-making, bee keeping, lamb raising, stone masonry, well digging, charcoal burning, choral singing, flax spinning: all participate in the one human task of making matter hum to match a heavenly note. A difference in scale does not imply a difference in purpose.
We aim to explore the territory of home-making in these pages, ranging into the multi-pointed meanings of both “home” and “to make.” We’ll be sharing details of the vernacular cabin we’re building on our new land in Vermont; our favorite sourdough crepe recipes; the orientation of a good herb garden; the poetry we’re reading this week; philosophical and theological musings on what it means to be human; and more.
We find inspiration on this quest all around us: in the unnamed carpenters whose artifacts still dot the New England landscape as beautifully-proportioned timber-framed houses and village churches; in the women who did and still do practice the arts of Athena, spinning and weaving flax and wool; in the patches of ramps tended by ancient Abenaki peoples on their summer hunting grounds.
Some fellow-travelers of our own time, from whom we’ve learned a new way of seeing, are writers like Wendell Berry, Paul Kingsnorth, Martin Shaw, and Michael Martin — all inestimable poets committed to the spiritual vision of creation; David Bentley Hart, who, more than anyone else, has articulated why the neoplatonic metaphysics of participation is a still-unsurpassed explanation of the dependance of matter on mind, a crucial assumption for our thinking here; Ivan Illich, Jacques Ellul, Owen Barfield, and Jeremy Naydler, who provide critical cartography for a way out of the Technopoly. More locally and recently, I have learned much from New England carpenters Will Lisak and Nevan Carling and their explorations in technography: old tools and ways of working that have a very contemporary relevance.
I could go on naming people and things, but it’s probably better to stop here. Hopefully, this incantatory litany of images, etymologies, associations, and influences gives you an idea of what to expect from these pages. If you too suffer from nostalgia (from the Greek, literally “homesickness”), then join the caravan and turn up the radio.
We’re on our way home.
Honored--both by you and by being named in such esteemed company!