'EMPTY NEST'
We metropolitan moderns talk in ugly, stupid, cliché'd figures of speech. 'Empty nest syndrome'.
This simile is wholly inaccurate. Parent birds do not feel bereft at their 'empty nest'. It is not a 'home' they will live in after their chicks have flown. It was just a tool to grow their chicks in. The parents just abandon it as soon as its job has been done.
What this simile refers to is the wholly dysfunctional and inadequate society of strangers we live in. A 'society' where the only true society we now know usually ends at the doorway of the nuclear family home into the street. It is a home created by the children who grow in it.
So when our children leave this home, the home is brought to an end until our children get married, and occasionally bring their children for a visit.
'Home' should have been a larger place where generations of extended families lived together in the past; live now, and will live in the future; where not just the house or the garden of one nuclear family, but the whole territory that sustained all of the families was 'home'. Permanent.
But our 'homes' now are indeed as impermanent as nests.
And it is this I mourn for. For when our sons were young, I felt for the first time since I was very young myself, at 'home'. The impermanence was not present to my sight. I was in Paradise. I felt it would never end, I had all the time in the world.
And yet even more, I mourn that I did not make myself present enough to my sons and my wife in those times. I did not have all the time in the world.
We moderns like to use that word - you know - the "L" word - to describe making ourselves present to others.
So I believe that I have lost even more than most moderns - I lost the opportunity to be with those who were most important to me, as now I and my wife face the extreme isolation even the most privileged moderns sometimes face.
Those who believe in past lives see in me many past lives of misery and tragedy. Certainly, when suddenly something makes me feel the extreme loss of community that we all of us go through, have gone through I guess, I weep bitter tears. The sad country songs that our Mom used to sing, when I hear those kind now. As the anthropologist Hugh Brody has said, those humans who turned to agriculture have doomed themselves to permanent homelessness in this world, so their songs are full of lament for the homelands they had to leave. Why do films of the 'holocaust' and similar motifs haunt so many of us? Because it is a monstrous reminder of what we all must suffer - the loss of all we love - our families and our homes.