We are all homeless

whether we know it or not

Find your way home now

Waking from a dream at four in the morning, you go to the bathroom you are tearing out as a partial renovation of the 1920s Craftsman bungalow you call home. Revisiting the exposed studs and backside of the old plaster lath walls that have been silently crumbling for a century, behind sheetrock façade of the shoddy redo from the 1970s. You shake off a poignant frisson of “home alone.”

Looking at the clock on the kitchen stove: 4:00 am as usual, you can’t help hearing the depressing Jesse Colin Young song, “Four in the Morning” run through your head. You return to your bed to sit in meditation, recalling a different but still depressing Stephen Stills song (4+20), resolving to “examine thoroughly in practice” (Dogen’s constant refrain) the implications of the dream that woke you up, with its vivid portrayal of a dystopian future designed just for you. As Bob Dylan said in a previous time of great international stress, “Everybody’s having them dreams” (Talkin’ World War III Blues). The pandemic has forced us to return to an aboriginal focus on the Dreamtime, according to breathless accounts in the media. But the dreams have been persisting in spite of, and before the dawn of, this contemporaneous threat to so-called normalcy.

“The lack of an unchanging self is itself our true home.”

— ZENKAI TAIUN MICHAEL ELLISTON

This particular dream was one of those vividly lucid but familiar nightmares on the recurring  theme of “you can’t get there from here,” with the usual lonely, frustrating and foreboding ending that does not end, except with your waking up again to the sleepwalking state we call “awake.” Reality seems to float somewhere in between, a not-two, middle way of ambivalence and ambiguity.

The particulars of this dream include car keys, a common motif for driving the car of our life, laying them down and looking away for a split second, and then they are gone. Not quite panicking yet, but digging a bit frantically in the void of what you now recognize as a concrete block, the edge of which must have been the momentary resting place for your key back home, and they must have fallen in. But finding only old dead growth, and unearthing curious, small white pearl-like painted heads, perhaps once living as beads on a long-ago lost, and now deteriorated, necklace or bracelet. At this moment you recall the ubiquitous iPhone, hoping it is somewhere on your person, so you can call home, in case you never find your car keys. S/he will surely come and get you, if you can just make the connection.

The hole seeming bottomless, you turn to what now appears to be the underside of the passenger seat in an old derelict truck on which you seemingly have been sitting, which turns up a fascinating variety of moldering items, but no keys. Just as you are thinking aloud, “He must have been living in here, with so much accumulated detritus,” the driver of the truck begins to engage you in sympathetic conversation, as if he, his wife and child have been there all along.

Cut to the vehicle suddenly hurtling along at a pretty good clip while you, the driver and his family continue friendly banter, and you note that the road you are driving on, presumably of the usual concrete or asphalt variety, actually consists of the top edges of hollowed out, miniature buildings, glowing internally as if from smoldering fire. Indicating that the scale of the tires of the truck must be enormous, to ride so roughshod over the rubble of the apocalypse. Looking through the rusted-away floor of the cabin, you feel and hear the textured thrum of the treads on the crumbling tops of the broken architecture.

Asking, more out of confusion than dread, whether or not we are still in the neighborhood of your current hometown? the kindly driver, his weathered and smiling visage just visible in the glow of the dashboard lights, says Well, no, not exactly—or something to that effect. Turning your attention to the windshield, you notice we are slowing to a stop, somewhere way out in the middle of a dark and windy landscape, tall grasslands and perhaps surrounding woods, lit only by the dim circle of the headlights. This is apparently your last stop, where you are to get out. As you are considering this prospect with some foreboding, you wake up and return to where you are—at home in bed, if not feeling exactly safe and sound.  

While the interconnectedness of our inter-being, that social realm and reality conveyed by the Compassionate Teaching as our birthright, cannot be gainsaid, it must be said that the other half of the nondual truth, that we are alone, suggests that we face the present and future with no guarantees that it will live up to our hopeful expectations. We may consider our current causes and conditions, our conventional circumstances, to be our true home, but they are subject to change. We are reminded of Master Dogen’s admonition in confronting these variables and vagaries as part and parcel of our true home, which has no place in space but exists in time only:      

…if you examine myriad things with a confused body and mind

  you might suppose that your mind and nature are permanent [but]

When you practice intimately and return to where you are


it will be clear that nothing at all has unchanging self (Genjokoan)


The lack of an unchanging self is itself our true home. Nonetheless we are not satisfied with this. This dissatisfaction is one meaning of dukkha. Welcome home. Practice intimately.