Tag: meaning

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Finding, moving, creating “home.”

Whilst in Maine last week with my family, my sister Beth and I were paddleboarding at dusk one day around the little cove of Pocasset Lake where our cabins are, when we noticed a very loud and large splash — abnormally large for a turtle or fish — but definitely too small for a human. Hmm. Soon after, we spotted two little brown noses jutting out of the water, gliding in smooth circles interspersed with splashes, coming from the same area. One of the curious little beavers came within 10 feet of Beth’s paddleboard, circling and eyeing us intently, bold and unalarmed. It was the cutest thing I’d seen in a long time; but despite going back to the same area at the same time the next night, we only saw the little beavers once.

Maine is probably the place on earth with the most sentimentality for my family and me. What used to be every summer — and with age and distance has become sporadic summers — the week that my family spent each year at our lakehouse in Wayne, Maine, has become timeless and infinite. These were weeks of endless, strewn-together days and nights of swimming, ice cream, cousins, waterskiing, lounging and tanning. People changed and grew up, lives were otherwise busy and eventful, milestones like weddings, kids, deaths and big moves came and went, but Wayne, Maine and Pocasset Lake has always been.

The osprey, the Great Blue Herons, the beavers, the kayaks and canoes and dress-ups, the General Store pizza or Five Islands lobster, the gentle hum of the motorboat on a sunny, lazy afternoon — these memories and the people I always spent them with — are bottled up and will be stored forever in the creaking, mouse-nibbled floorboards of Robmir and fraying, taped-together ropes securing the boats to the dock. The beauty and power of memory — and especially the power of a certain place to hold, for years upon years — memories that bring an entire family, an intergenerational, transnational family together — is nothing short of magical.

This is turning out to be basically just a post for me to reminisce on my family memories and how lucky I was to take a summer trip to Maine this year, particularly. However, I find myself moving in the next couple weeks to a new apartment in LA — what may be my 6th move in 4 years — and I can’t help but contrast that transience with the longevity and meaning of a family “home.”

What creates a sense of home or what makes a place a home?

I think people and memory have a lot to do with it. When a location, a building, a structure holds sentimentality and memories, it is much more than simply a place. And normally, those memories are associated with people and moments. Do you have places, spaces or ordinary structures in your life that mean much more to you because of the people and memories that you associate them with? What does “home” look like for you?

This post-college, yuppie, Trader Joe’s frozen food and IKEA plant version of myself is still struggling to find “home” in Los Angeles, and yet, in so many beautiful ways, this city has certainly become my home. Despite the transient lifestyle I’ve acquired and the changing scenery and friend groups every year or so, pieces of my ethno-cultural identity do feel much more secure and able to grow, question and develop themselves here than in other parts of the US or world that I’ve lived.

But is that “home”?

It is certainly something — and looking both behind and ahead as I consider this next move, I hope that my life continues to align itself toward and around creating — albeit an ever-elusive — sentiment that this (wherever I am in any given time or place) is “home.”

Maybe “home” in this season of life can be created through rhythms and patterns of slowing down, or being intentional, or cultivating meaningful moments and relationships. Because when I think about what makes the Frederich family lakehouse on Pocasset, in a random town in rural Maine, so special, it’s those exact things. The meaning comes with longevity and time, but it comes primarily because of the people, patterns and memories associated with that time. And if we don’t always have the luxury of owning a property or inhabiting a space for any extended period of time, especially as a young person in Los Angeles, then can we still create “home” and meaning and memory through rhythms and people — even if they are geographically changing or moving within or across a city?

I think so; I want to at least hope so.

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Learning to lament & a train that wouldn’t stop.

I had a dream last night that I was riding on a train through LA that wouldn’t stop.

Night was imminent, an eerie sensation of helplessness in the midst of this train’s planned, intentional and determined route sunk deep into my gut and bones.

It wasn’t a panicked helplessness like that time the bus I was riding in Bangkok broke down at a random spot in the city (this situation ended up completely okay, not to worry).

No, it was like a deep-seated grief, coupled with nostalgia, memory, sadness and loss that began to emerge. The places this train was taking me were intentional and meaningful spots where significant moments in the past four years had taken place. It carried me by restaurants and parks where I’d passed old time with friends, by my church in Santa Monica, by a spot in Manhattan Beach where I’d taken my dad once, when he visited, to take photos, the old company I used to work for, the hospital that I’m working at now but not going to be working at for much longer, a churro spot where I had a date before quarantine started.

I woke up not because the train stopped, but because I realized that everything was empty and it jolted me; every place and memory wasn’t filled by the people that were once a part of it; there was only an empty shell of a building or distant voices but no one to associate them with as the train passed by each spot.

I don’t know what to make of this haunting dream, except that maybe it’s a representation of how quarantine, how this current state of the world feels, a subconscious, haunting, visual representation of emptiness and loss.

This time feels all about dichotomies and tensions to me — the tension between exhaustion & rest, silence & noise, essentiality and non-essentiality, virtual chatter & solitude, different degrees and types of grief (like the grief of the enormity of a global pandemic that’s claiming hundreds of thousands of lives or grief over a relationship that never happened or grief over not being able to see my family or friends), the past, present, future and the way they’ve melded together to become one and the same. The way I’m answering questions I’m faced with as a chaplain visiting families with sick children & the way I’m answering questions that I ask myself — the question that emerges from all of that: when is it okay to not have answers?

That train ride reminded me that I have lost things over the years.

And in the past month.

Things that may not be as “big” as others’ losses, but things that I need to make space to grieve the loss of, all the same.

Maybe an appropriate response to some of this tension, these dichotomies, is to make space for lament and grief. What does it look like for us to mourn the losses that we’ve faced in this time, without comparing them to other types or magnitudes of losses, without necessarily seeing them in tension with anything else, but instead simply a true representation of our past and present experience?

Sometimes the tension is good.

Sometimes though, it’s necessary to hold each thing individually, give each of those things space instead of inherently understanding them as “in tension,” in comparison with other things (I’m saying this more to myself than you). Our human brains look for significance, to make sense of things. It often doesn’t make sense why we care about certain things more than others; why some things move us much more or make us much more sad than other things. How do we measure personal significance or truly mourn our losses if we’re trying to understand their inherent “worth” in comparison to other things?

The losses through which your train ride would take you, over this past month and a half especially, matter a lot.

How do we make space for the grief and the loss of both “big” and “small” things?

How do we understand that all of those things are important and they matter?

What would your train ride look like? How would it make you feel? How would you remember, honor and lean into each of those places of memory?