Anyone who has read this blog for any period of time knows that I have an unusually strong relationship to England. It seems to go beyond my love of the cathedral music tradition and my heritage. It seems to go beyond the frustration of having never found a way to live there, and it is still powerful even though I have arguably come more fully "home" in a spiritual way, to the voice of the divine feminine within.
There's a quality to it all that I can only equate to having stumbled on the "radio station"/wavelength of extreme homesickness, of people all through history, who end up, for whatever reason, away from the place that feels like home...and those whose homes have been completely changed by outsiders. This got me thinking about the experience of European women back in the 1600's and 1700's (when some of my own forebears were leaving England for what is now the New York area). I mean, I keep having to remind myself that women at that time had absolutely no civil, religious, legal, or economic rights. They could not act autonomously. If their father, brother, or young husband came home one day and announced, "We are going to sail to the new world", it's not like the woman could say no. She might grumble, or list a few reasons why it wasn't a good idea. She might even state some of her fears. But if the man who held power over her was determined to make this move, ultimately, she had to go too. And in those days, once you said good-bye to family, friends, and familiar surroundings, you were not likely ever to see them (or even an image of them) again. There were no cameras or video news reports. Attempts to send mail across the Atlantic would have to have been spotty and unreliable. As the ship sailed and the ties were broken, as the energetic roots were pulled out like a tree from the soil, many women's hearts would have been broken too. They could never sail back alone. The "film negative" images of people, the medieval churches, thatched cottages, castles, fields and hedgerows must have been in front of their eyes for the rest of their lives...and perhaps (who knows?) have moved down the generations. It might at least partly explain how those images affect, even at times overwhelm, me nearly 400 years later.
I won't begin to attempt to write about the violence, trauma, heartbreak, and homesickness of people grabbed off the streets into slavery, sent on forced marches, imprisoned for no reason, or deprived of their homelands in other violent ways. Those legacies are more horrific by far, and as a culture, we haven't even begun to process them. The experience of early white women settlers is barely on the same radar screen. And yet, if I put myself in their shoes (perhaps several of my own great-great-great grandmothers) -- literally on the cusp of getting off the boat in 17th century New York -- I have to assume they were baffled, heartbroken, and possibly even angry at having had so little say in the matter of their uprootedness. As they stood on the deck of the boat looking ashore, they probably only had about two minutes to recognize their truth. Within moments, they were pressed into action, to help their families get off the boat and acclimate to an entirely new continent. They might never again have allowed themselves the luxury of grief...but unspoken grief doesn't go away. It keeps flowing down the generations.
Homesickness may only happen when people are (or feel) powerless. Someone fully in control of their life (and for whom the system "works") can make healthy choices, decisions that are right for them. It has taken me nearly 70 years to really start feeling the extent to which, even now, we women are looking out of our eyes at, what is essentially, a foreign country, a "country" that may rarely operate the way we do. In this situation, where is "home", both physically and spiritually? How do we heal from personal and communal homesickness?
