VIII.
The home that I steward is so big that I can step out the front door and I am still inside it. It’s so big that I can travel for months and years and generations and every place that I’m traveling is new. It’s so big that I can’t be a hundred percent sure if I ever leave it. But once I do, I know I’ve left it. I know because I’m not alone, because I can’t get there, because I’m found in a very lost way. Because when I look up at Orion’s Belt I see stars that are Very Far Away, because dreams are not as real as reality, because questions that don’t have answers are silly and don’t deserve any time but free time, because of the reality factor and the world we can’t trust. Because questions that don’t have answers get you nowhere. Because my values, my values means I have priorities. Because I came down to Earth and when my feet found the ground it was hard and I had fallen, and the fall was hard and falling is what I want to avoid. Because falling and hard falls hurt.
Because of laws like gravity, real laws that I don’t control, that I can’t change, that affect me no matter what. Because pain afflicts me, because I can try and do things to stop or prevent it from afflicting me, ‘cuz I want to get rid of it. Because I can’t live with it all the time. Because I can’t live it all the time, because I fall out of living it because of real world laws like gravity. Because dreams are less real, because I have values and priorities and dreams are silly on-the-scheme-of-things, dreams are silly and don’t deserve the time that real world factors require. Because I can’t trust the real world and I can’t be free until that point at which I must die, because down the line all creatures alive must at some point not be alive. I can’t be free until I die, at which point reality factors don’t matter. Because I can’t, because Because.
At some point I get lost, so lost that I’m found so I’m neither. I’m neither until I fall and am found by others and together we deem that before we found each other, before I fell, I was lost.
When I get lost, I am free to attend the home for questions. I attend the questions. I tend their home, the home of my Lost Boy, who belongs to No One, who is still Lost because I do not find him.
The home doesn’t have a name in itself, but from the ground here, looking up at Orion’s belt, I’ll call it Any Where and it feels very hard to get to. But all it takes is getting Lost. Or forgetting, getting forgotten. From the ground here, Any Where is always getting forgotten, but always getting remembered as soon as I can see it. Any Where is partly in the backdrop, the Backdrop, and that’s why it can get forgotten and remembered so easily from the ground here.
Lots of questions are also partly embedded in backdrops, in the Backdrop, and they are all unique so they live at Any Where for various varying lengths of Line. I can never be sure if a question has left the home: the home is very big and the questions all vary. It seems to me, from the space that I live (which I call my room—my Lost Boy’s room—at Any Where), that various questions come and go, come and go. There are always more new questions and more old ones, new new ones and new old ones and old new ones. But not old old ones, just more old ones. So I make more space. I make space by turning furniture on its head or getting things to get lost, to hit the next leg of their journey. I know a very small, very plastic shape who lives in a wallet; on the shape is a universal symbol for recycling. Often I get things to get lost when I find the shape and point to the next arrow of the symbol.
As I make space the questions wander by me past me through me. They stop and seat themselves near where I’m working. Some of them watch me work, others make sandwiches on a surface I’ve tipped over and quietly enjoy an improvised picnic; still others play games of solitaire with lost playing cards. I get the sense that some questions were once real naggers, real burdens to the people who’ve since lost them. But here in their home, questions live the possibility of being any way they are without being that way for sure.
Oftentimes as I make space, a question will stop and ask itself to me, and I will attend. They’ll ask again and again and I’ll listen, and we’ll have a splendid time just living like that, as a question asking itself and a Lost Boy not finding an answer, not answering the question. Answering a question is like killing it, which is neither-either-wrong-nor-right. Sometimes I answer questions, I need to answer them, they need to be answered; they ask themselves and I have the answer before I realize that they’re already gone.
Sometimes I live the question. In the home for questions, it’s mostly a practice to live questions. Then the question lives, and I am living, and we live together as one so that we are still lost, and living into our answer, the way everything alive at some point lives death. Living in our way, living our way. Mostly the answer is the question, mostly we are neither question nor answer, we are living and living Any Where.
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