I grew up in Australia. Big skies tend to set your standards. When I was a child and we went to the country farm of my cousins, I always felt something unrolling in me at the sight of great swathes of houseless space. When we had to return to Melbourne, as soon as we got close enough to see, on the darkening horizon, the eerie orange glow of the city, I would feel myself scrunching down. Not just because it was back to school, back to a more insular nuclear family life, but because it was away from the space that held itself but spoke back to me at the same time. In the way that other people's houses didn't. Other people's houses looked outward but really their eyes were blinded.
When I was younger than today's receding collagen levels, I always thought I could live in, say, a converted cathedral, except for the hassle of cleaning and heating the bloody thing. Or a castle, except that in reality you would be living in three or four rooms and closing off the rest to save on the three figure heating bills.
But it's not a large house I yearn for now. It's large space. It's not neighbours I dislike. It's just having their house right bloody there. It's looking outside and seeing house, house, house and house that sinks my heart. Not because the neighbours are there but because the trees aren't.
To be really honest, I have yearned forever for a stand of 200 trees as my house's overcoat, and my actusl aneighbours to be at least 300 paces away. Nothing personal. I love the in-theory knowing that my neighbours and I are sharing the same communal space. In practice it is not like Neighbours here these days. People do not feel we share anything important together, even though if the apocalypse came we will be stuck dependent on each other. I do hope, if I move further bushward, that the lighter concentration of neighbours will nevertheless come with a still-intact rural ethos of shared communal space.
I thirst for that.
It is 99% environmentally unsustainable to wish for yourself a house encased in acres of trees for your own psychological enfoldenment. But nevertheless it persists. And lucky for me, I live in a country where it is possible to do. ~I cannot get enough of big spaces, and big ideas, and big conceptions of which people are in (everyone) and which people are out (no one). Even the universe is not quite big enough for me. I want ... this, this existence, this live thing, to go on even beyond the universe, and I admit -- even though it is an unfashionable concept, and even though fundamentalist religion entirely distorts it, and the boxed-in concept of God is worse than useless but is now often a smallness and an evil -- that I want the centre of everything to have a golden seed of the divine. That admission automatically reduces me because our general ideas of what that means are small. But it doesn't make my internal world smaller. It makes it crazy mystical unheadwrapple ayahausca trip big fat dripping.
I guess if I was going to label my spirituality as anything these days (which I decidedly don't wish to do) I would be a panentheist. Pantheism is a little too small for me. It's not enough for the divine to be everything. I want the divine to be in everything. I suppose I like this idea because it makes everything feel even bigger to me, and I like the idea of the Source being underneath and in it all, I guess because I don't think God or Source is a small provincial purveyor of motherfuckery but more someone who is trippingly so amazing that we would willingly throw ourselves into their giant vat of golden whateverthefuck.
I do not feel small and insignificant when I think and fail at thinking of how big the universe is. It just feels like possibility and potentiality and grandness, to me. Big fat swathes of space without timeclocks. That I am small in comparison just doesn't make me feel small in comparison. If I am That, then that idea falls entirely away and just the Big Space remains with me small, like a seed, feeling encased and enclosed within its great massiveness, at least for this one still, freezing cold moment, on a winter Sunday early afternoon.
