Homestead

Home is where the heart is. This is a phrase I have heard all my life, but what makes a house into a home I wonder, and furthermore can one actually set out to create a home? Well within this passage I invoke both my vision of home and the intent to build or obtain it.

What follows is my vision of home, well rather what the house contains and what materials construct it, for this is only the house and garden. The home is where the heart is, subjecting that any house can be a home if the heart resides within it and that same heart yearns for it when time, location or work must separate the two.

So let me vision for you my desired construct of the house and gardens.

Picture if you will a block of land by the sea, preferably a sheltered bay where the sea laps the shore in gentle melodic tones. Along the shore front stand great trees of pine and pohutukawa amidst soft grass and the scents, within a garden of pleasure where flowers abound in many colours and shapes with butterflies and bees. Here relaxation is infused with contemplation. Here structure is abandoned in favour of stimulation and beauty. Form is favoured over function.

There are no boundaries of constructed format. This is a place where plants, insects, birds, and human cohabitate and collaborate as they would have it. The garden contains grand Oak and Willow together with fruit trees of apple and nectarine and vines of grape and passion fruit, bushes of mandarin. These are mixed with beds containing vegetables and herbs for cooking or just good health, some for drinking and some simply because of the delicious scents like jasmine. Nearby are some bee hives. This is a garden of abundance and pleasure where one can work intuitively and walk in with an empty basket and walk out enriched by beauty and with the evening meal. This is a vision where the evening meal is an enjoyable process from the growing to gathering, preparation, cooking and eating.

In harmony with the environment, the house stands nestled within the grounds. Here space is generous. Beauty and texture stand side by side amid a craftsman’s pride. The house welcomes its guests with a loving personality. Each corner opens up a new possibility and multiple levels of enjoyment where one can seek company or solitude. Rooms and spaces each have their own purpose. Here love and the passion for life are enhanced with music, books, art, pottery and furniture that weave a rich tapestry of form and function.

Within the grounds will be found small cottages of similar architecture where guests could stay for a while to regenerate and replenish the life force that sustains them.

Beyond the house and gardens is where nature presents its raw natural beauty. Here grand trees stand and birds sing. Simply put this is nature’s garden, where the wheel of life turns without the hand of man, where the only sound are the birds singing and the wind rustling through the leaves. With luck and good fortune there is a small stream and waterfall to complete the picture.

All these things I desire to have and share with all who come to the door, be they passing through or staying for a while to regenerate. Where each person is enriched by the space, and where the space itself can heal and repair the body, mind and soul, because we play our part with all the lives, large and small, from plants the house itself, playing their part in a cooperative community that is living for one purpose, for the love life itself.

The wheel of life

As another birthday rolls around on the wheel of life, I look once more at my life and its direction. Life, that word has new meaning now; it now has purpose and meaning. Life is always putting little challenges in front of me, though I guess it is the same for all. Looking at the past, through childhood and adult years, serves no purpose in itself, it does not change anything nor can looking at the past resolve anything. The best I can do is look where I am and gauge my present course. Asking, is it right for me? Am I doing the best I can with what I have?

These are fine questions to ask but they themselves do little to resolve the present moment. Indeed the present moment is all I have. I have recently been informed that life is guided. We each have our own guide who is constantly at our side, in good times and especially in bad. Not only do they guide me though life but they guide me to others and others to me. Each moment of life is for the purpose of growth and for the resolution of past and present issues.

In my work there have been times of creativity and tremendous enjoyment and also times where that creativity is squashed. Why I ask myself, as at the moment the latter is the case. I have a project on at work that fires my passion, but those in charge wish to run the project by the book with all the trappings of the full SDLC process. That is fine, but when it crushes the creative process I have a problem with it.

This all may sound like a grizzle and truth be told it is. Why? Why would my guide present this situation for me? Well it seems that it arises through my free will and of those around me, not a guided scenario, yet my guide presents me with advice and guidance on how best to proceed. ‘Nothing is a waste of time’ he tells me, nothing is wasted, all knowledge and experience is used to further the process. There is more to this than I am aware of it would seem.

It turns out that our guides are omnipresent, presenting choices, guiding those choices as well. Some are able to listen and other not so much, but they are always present. One new piece of information that I've learned recently is that my presents is also used to affect others, just as others affect me, I am used to affect others.

Today I had lunch with a family member that did not end well. But on checking in latter it was for the best. Sometimes we have to go through a difficult time or event to learn or resolve something. It is difficult to stand back and let life unfold sometimes, especially hard when you see someone you love presenting pain. I know now that this pain is not mine or mine to resolve. When it comes to the duty of care for life, then yes we must intervene and sustain life, but when it comes to pain of the emotional kind, we often have to stand back and let events play out. This is true when others present joy, we do not step in to stop it, we encourage it and let it unfold. Pain or sorrow are no different, they are just other forms of expressing emotion from which we can grow.

It is difficult to do when it is someone you love, but when it is happening to me it feels personal, when it is my turn to walk through the mud then it becomes very difficult to watch others stand back but stand back they must so that I can learn to crawl out of the mud myself. Growth can often be a painful process what’s more the process of growth never stops, I am nearly 60 and I’m still growing.

All life is an opportunity for growth and we must grow for that is the purpose of life. It is called ‘The wheel of life’ and it is relentlessly turning.