I often dream of houses, my subconscious winding through rooms that represent homes in my life made unfamiliar in the way dreams scramble fiction and reality. It occurred to me recently that this might be because in my waking hours, I find myself using the house as a metaphor for myself. In middle school I came across an ancient Eastern idea that our bodies are houses with rooms devoted to the physical, emotional, spiritual, and so forth, and I’ve unintentionally foisted this approach on my life.
The problem is that it’s too easy to get distracted or hung up in one room and forget to circulate. I have spent too much of my adulthood as a house with just one or two lights on, spurring the question from passersby of whether or not anyone’s home or if a light was merely left on by accident. I have spent years pacing the same room firmly situated in the physical, the material–my body, my money. The floor creaks with the same recitation: It is all too much. I carry the excess weight on my frame, the stress of what motherhood and feeling like there is never enough money in the bank has done to my physical presence. It’s a refrain of worry and wishing for more passion and purpose, wealth and health, and dreaming of faraway places.
Meanwhile, dusty cobwebs have all but overtaken the untended spaces. It’s the moment now to push past the safety and busyness of routine to expand my route, explore the neglected parts of myself, and cultivate the seedling dreams in me. Run through a sun salutation in the room of spirit, spill some paint in the studio of creativity, possibly cartwheel in the playroom. I can’t even say for certain in all this time of being caught up in my predictable routines what other rooms exist. Is there an expansive gleaming, wooden floor for dancing? Is there a rink out back for ice skating? Is there a desk in front of a grand window where I can write?
I can’t take myself and my life so seriously every day. There has to be more fun. Time for riding my happy, yellow bicycle and catching a matinee, for late night bonfires and rollerskating in the living room. I want to sip coffee on the deck in the morning while the birds chirp and the chipmunk hunts for lost nuts in the flower pot. I want crossword puzzles at brunch and baking cookies with the kids who eat too much of the dough. Time for candlelit meditation, for long embraces with my husband instead of a quick peck before rushing out the door, for an evening with enough time for a bubble bath soak.
Part of my hesitation to explore these other facets of myself is that it’s not all spontaneous laughter and catching prisms of light dancing on the wall. There are a multitude of unanswered questions that surface unexpectedly like the haunting shape of a body floating to the top of the river, something that can’t possibly be real but that we also understand is sometimes exactly the ugly truth it seems. There is anger looming there, so many words stuffed down in the name of being nice. I know there is also an indeterminable sadness, a melancholic longing that is gorgeous in the way its razor sharp edges slice into the patchwork of my getaway parachute.
I hold such depth to my hunger for more, to how desperately I have wanted to expand beyond the small spheres I’ve been spinning within. I want to fling open windows and turn on every light, electrify this house until there is absolutely no confusion from the neighbors or myself whether or not anyone’s home. I might’ve been holed up in a dormant trance, my own personal haunting, but I’m here and awake and I’m shining and shouting, “Welcome home!”
It’s about damn time.
Gabrielle Koontz 