I finished reading Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich this morning.

The Earth is our home, and the future home will be the Earth to come. In the story, the planet is changing fast and the future seems highly uncertain. This is also true outside the book, in our own reality.

Home is the place where you are grounded. The place you put your feet down and feel “at home.” It’s the place without which you would have no existence at all. When drastic changes occur it can feel abruptly like you don’t belong anywhere, you have no home, and suddenly you’re not cut out for life on the Earth. Your very existence is threatened.

Sometimes you need something deeper than a home to crawl into, something subterranean and deeper than ground. Cedar seeks out the solitude of her own house where she lives alone. She calls this place her “den,” which is “the place I can be merely the nameless being I am, a two-decade-plus collection of quirks and curiosities, the biochemical machine that examines its own mind, the searcher who believes equally in the laws of physics and the Holy Ghost …”

In a sense everyone has a home, even if all you have is the wide earth. But without a den, a place to retreat to and bury yourself for a time, how could you have those mad thoughts that other people wouldn’t (perhaps shouldn’t) understand? How would you ever reconcile science and God? Mortality and hope? The irrational and the rational? You need a space to entertain those thoughts which, when uttered in the company of other people, fragment into a million pieces …

Perhaps some people don’t need a place to recharge and are happy to just roam the earth. All I can say is I could really relate to Cedar’s description of her den.

(Image: NASA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)