A Sense of Place: Are You in the Scattering or the Going Deep?

"What do you want people to know about your story?" I ask the young woman across from me. She is fidgety. Unsure.

She has no problem telling me that her favorite food is pizza or that she likes 1980's music. She pushes the hair out of her face.

I am overseeing the interviews of a group of homeless guests for I-HELP (Interfaith Homeless Emergency Lodging Program). Three of us are interviewing nine folks who have agreed to have their pictures taken and to answer a few questions. I can tell this woman would rather be eating the lasagna being served in the room next door than to be sitting here talking about herself.

I try a different question. "What words would you use to describe yourself?"

"Outspoken." She pushes away her bangs again. "And ornery."

I gently nudge. "What do you want people to know about your story?"

She blurts it out in a rush. "My hometown is Stockton, California."

That unlocks the gate. Suddenly she wants to talk about her pet cat as a child and days on the beach, with the ocean lapping at her toes. And blue is her favorite color - like the waves. And spring. Who doesn't like the ocean in springtime?

The story of how she became homeless--a common story of health woes, addictions, and job loss doesn't interest her. This isn't what she wants people to KNOW about her story. What she wants people to know was that she once had a home.

Homelessness has scattered her wide, forcing her to find a bed wherever she can, but the longing of the heart is to go deep, to put down roots in the familiar. Finding none in the present, her memory stretches long, into the past.

A beach. The color blue. The spring. The name of her hometown.

The need to name and be named.

The need is so deep that scientists have a term for those who have lost the ability to name: visual agnosia. The term is used for people who cannot recognize familiar objects and faces. Having lived thirty years in the same home, in the same city, with the same people, I do not suffer from this malady.

My roots go deep, allowing me to write from a deep sense of place. The saguaro. The desert in springtime. The Superstition Mountains. I am grounded in the familiar, giving me a foundation to see more clearly the changes around me and in me. 

Leslie Leyland Fields in her book, Crossing the Waters: Following Jesus through the Storms, the Fish, The Doubt, and the Seas, also writes from a strong sense of place, but Leslie doesn't write about dipping her toe into the beach waters of California. Leslie writes from the viewpoint of being a part of her family's commercial fishing operation in Alaska for over three decades on a remote island with just her family and crew.

Her words drip the familiar:

"I scan the ocean one more time. My island is just two miles away, but the waters are a tempest of urgent, roiling waves. The wind has come down since morning, but it’s still blowing about thirty miles per hour. It’s not far to go, but half of the distance I will travel will be climbing the waves skyward and then skittering down the other side. The trick is to keep the boat quartered in the waves, and to stay away from the curl and break."

Leslie writes of the challenges of storms. Of relationship conflicts. Of jellyfish...yes...jellyfish.

"But it’s a jellyfish night, or rather, a jellyfish week. The ocean is thick and mucus-y with them, these Aurelia aurita, moon jellyfish, the clear kind that look like ocean water plus Knox Gelatin, with a little hyphenated cross as its entrails...I don’t mind these...But other jellyfish come with them, these giant glops of oranges, pinks, rusts, as large as sinks, even bathtubs at times, their stinging strings like snot trailing behind."

(I know there are a zillion quotes I could have chosen from the book, but I LOVE this imagery of snot-like jelly blobs! Only someone who had lived, breathed, and experienced this could write from this strong sense of place.)

Leslie delves deep into stories about water in scripture and narrates the familiar words from a viewpoint of living on the sea.

• Jesus walking on the water.

• Jesus asleep in the midst of the storm

• Feeding the 5000 with 5 loaves and 2 fish

• The impossibility of fishermen leaving their nets to follow a man who promises that they will be fishers of men.

The disciples were called to leave home and scatter wide. Not called to leave, Leslie writes of the challenges of following Him by staying. 

By fishing. By cleaning nets. By remaining.  

Crossing the Waters tells part of that hard story, bringing new life to what it means to follow Jesus.

I have known a hard story. The leaving. The one left remaining.  The monotony of mending. I have known the scattering and the going deep.

And I have seen both in the eyes of a homeless woman who longs for the ocean, but who is finding God in the desert.

In this, we three women are similar--one, a homeless guest; one, a desert dweller; and one, a commercial fisherman. Whether we scatter wide or go down deep, we are all seeking the same thing.

A sense of belonging. Of discovering a home...a shelter...that has nothing to do with a roof over our heads.

Leslie finds it at sea. I find it in the desert. A homeless woman is finding it through the kindness of strangers giving her new roots.

The three of us, are discovering home in the words, "Come, follow me."

How about you? Where are you in the scattering and the going deep? In the belonging?

I highly recommend Leslie's book, Crossing the Waters: Following Jesus through the Storms, the Fish, The Doubt, and the Seas.

It is for us all in the leaving. In the staying. And for those who need hope in the storm.