Tom Montgomery Fate: From Iowa to Chicago, my idea of home has evolved

“The place do you name dwelling?” a reporter as soon as requested me in an interview for her newspaper.

“Iowa,” I mentioned.

“I believed you lived in Chicago,” she replied.

“I do,” I mentioned. “However I’m out of Iowa. I’m from there, and I left there.”

Then, I defined that I’d lived in Chicago for many of my life however was slowly migrating again to Iowa the entire time. We lived in Hyde Park on Chicago’s South Aspect for six years, then moved west to Oak Park, on the city-suburb border, for six years, after which to Glen Ellyn, a western ‘burb, for an additional six years. We had been returning to Iowa in 10-mile increments each six years and would arrive on the Illinois-Iowa border once I was 104.

Although that westward migration stalled way back. And since then, my concept of dwelling has developed. Now it’s much less a bodily location than a sort of belonging. It’s the place my sense of being and my huge longings converge into one factor, one thing wordless — a sort of realizing, or perception, that I belong to creation. I consider the massive bluestem or blazing star on the prairie — how every plant is anchored by its looking out — for water, for all times. As affected person and chronic as an Iowa farmer, the roots preserve spiraling deeper into the darkness, on their method dwelling.

I first got here throughout this sense of dwelling 30 years in the past in a subject research course on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. In a sweat lodge, Francis White Lance, a medication man, shared a core perception: mitakuye oyasin, that means “all my relations,” or “I’m associated to all that’s.” Residence as relationship — with birds and bugs and rivers and rocks, and different folks. The phrase serves as a sort of closing prayer in Lakota ceremonies and connotes a house that’s each bodily and religious.

On the Pine Ridge, and elsewhere, I’d be taught that I needed to go away Iowa to grasp all that dwelling might imply. This paradox suggests why that boring, flat, lovely state now serves as my trailhead for a guide of journey essays. A few of my journeys are “out of Iowa,” as in from there, and rooted in my household and childhood, whereas others are “out of Iowa,” as in away from there, and describe my treks via vastly completely different cultures. However these two strands of reminiscence — “from” and “away from” — additionally converge right into a single braid of that means: journey that takes you dwelling.

“We journey, initially, to lose ourselves,” writes Pico Iyer, “and we journey, subsequent, to seek out ourselves.” Iyer has written a dozen journey books about unique, far-flung cultures — from the Philippines to Kathmandu. I liked these books, however the one I reread is a critique of all of the others: “The Artwork of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere,” through which Iyer explores the need of the internal journey — of being misplaced, and located, after which misplaced once more. This type of looking out is implied within the French origin of “journey” — travail: labor, toil, struggling, bother. Journey entails battle, and a means of discovery and transformation.

“It issues not the place or how far you journey,” Henry David Thoreau writes, “the farther generally the more serious — however how a lot alive you’re.” Once I learn “Walden” in school, this line confused me. So did his claiming that he’d “traveled an ideal deal in Harmony,” the small city the place he lived his entire life. It made extra sense a few years later, once I reread the guide, and contemplated my very own life in a small city. Thoreau knew he belonged there.

And perhaps that’s the entire level: We’re all the time on some detour, and all the time on our method dwelling. However because the birds remind us, that phrase — “dwelling” — is each a verb and a noun, each a journey and a vacation spot. Which is why we’re by no means fairly positive when and if we’ve arrived — whether or not in small-town Iowa or the South Aspect of Chicago.

Tom Montgomery Destiny is an emeritus professor on the School of DuPage in Glen Ellyn. This frivolously edited essay is excerpted with permission from Destiny’s new guide “The Lengthy Method Residence: Detours and Discoveries.”

Submit a letter, of not more than 400 phrases, to the editor right here or e-mail letters@chicagotribune.com.