HOME

Old Rasmussen Farm, Dublin, CA.

We spend a large part of our lives trying to find our way home. The trouble is we don’t have the aptitude for it that cats do.

Taken in that context, what is Home?

It is not just a shelter with roof and four walls. It’s the place we feel most authentically ourselves. It provokes a yearning when we have lost it, or when we brush up against an old memory. I asked Dr. Advice to recall the feeling he had when he thought of his grandparents old farm in Dublin; not the house specifically, but the memory of family when he was there. It places “Home” in the realm of feelings.

I developed no strong memories from our travels during my early childhood, but the final years of high school while living in the house my great-grandfather had built in Alameda, CA, gave my first sense of continuity, of being a part of something larger than my immediate family.

In my first summer living with the Pueblo Indians in New Mexico, I began to feel a part of the Pueblo life as I roamed unchallenged through the villages with my friend and guide Georgia Abeita, making pottery and painting. The example of their quiet acceptance that life would continue as it had for timeless eons was contagious. That feeling never varied through the 40 years that Dr. Advice and I visited New Mexico and Arizona each year. I breathe the clear early morning air and feel that I may be close to home.

“Near Taos” watercolor painting by kayti sweetland rasmussen

“Pueblo Woman with Pot” Stoneware by kayti sweetland rasmussen

We each create our own version of Home. A favorite niece, mother of four, anticipating the future arrival of many grandchildren, insisted upon a very large kitchen sink, suitable for bathing babies. Having come from a large happy family, the concept of home included lots of babies, who would all grow to think of her house as Home.

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My excitement was strong upon arriving in Seattle in the 70″s and we took up country living for the first time. The old house and the barn we built with our own hands tied me to the property like nothing before had done. In the five years we lived there I grew to know and love the area like the back of my hand, but when the moving van had removed furniture from our old farmhouse near the Lake, a friend remarked that it had only taken a few hours to make a home a house.

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Though my father had loved the sea, he was eager to return to the place he had been born, and which he had left at the age of 18. So after nearly 30 years at sea he built a house in the countryside in Grants Pass, intent upon returning to the land. He bought a cow, a horse, some rabbits and some geese. A few years later the house burned to the ground, and I sensed that he had a certain feeling of relief. He was now free again to travel with my mother without the obligations that a brick and mortar house brought. The ownership of “house” did not give him the feeling of “home” that he had missed.

A few years later my mother missed having roots and the balance it had given to her life for a few short years, and went shopping alone one day and bought a house on the coast in Brookings, OR. I’m happy to say that my father adjusted to the idea that this tiny woman finally said “Like it or not, I’m through being a wanderer.”

Though a particular house or building is not the kind of Home I speak of, in many cases it may surely be a part of the feeling of home. Many years after I had married I felt the insult strongly when I returned to Auntie’s house and found it changed beyond my recognition. How dare the Intruders who stepped in and bartered my childhood memories?

We deposit much of our energy and love into making a home. Children come and go, friends enter and exit, beloved pets become part of the equation. The celebration of holidays, and of important life occasions, add patina. Happiness and some sadness both burnish and tarnish, forming the Whole of Life.

For the past 40 years we have lived in our present home. When we first arrived in our town of Centerville 60 years ago, it had a population of 6,000, now there are 225,000 people living here and it has become the city of Fremont, CA. We have become a part of the community and our roots have taken hold much as the trees and plants which make up our garden. This is Home.

Home truly is where the heart is. Where we achieve our balance.

A SCULPTOR’S STUDIO

“Heartbeat of the Earth”

This anguished face came to me in my dream, and seemed to exemplify centuries of pain and isolation. His drumbeat reverberated through the earth in olden times.

Step into a sculptor/potter’s studio and you are surrounded with the “home-again” smell of wet clay. Delicious in its earthiness, for who of us has not dabbled our hands and our toes in mud as a child of summer? The other earth smells of glaze materials, iron, copper, tin, magnesium, plus the thick powdery odor of dry plaster fill your nostrils. Odious perhaps if this is not your venue of choice, and as singular as the “divine” fragrance of oil paint and turps to the painter. If you have been obliged to be away from these smells as I have for the past year, it is a treat to visit a fellow potter’s studio and smell the familiar odors of creative art being made.

People have been making things out of clay for longer than anyone can know. Food utensils, ornaments, and images of people and animals are found all over the earth, and the art is as fresh as when it was made by these ancient hands.

The same skills are used today in building a pot or a sculpture as was used so long ago. We recently visited an exhibit of the Terracotta Army from China at the Asian Museum in San Francisco, and I marveled at the enormous clay warriors and horses all made by the same coiled clay method used today by the potters of the Southwest.

This strong connection with ancient potters fills me with peace and a longing for something indefinable. My own connection only goes back for a couple of hundred years to England and then to Canada, where my ancestors had potteries. I have a glaze recipe which was used for Royal Doulton pottery, which calls for enough material to keep several artisans supplied for a lifetime!

I have worked in clay, wax and bronze, molding the clay and wax into recognizable shapes for most of my life, and clay has given me the most sublime pleasure. Your hands are your implements to create what your mind sees, much as writing in that respect. Both are solitary endeavors, demanding focus of thought. Working with clay, I feel I am connected in a small way to something timeless yet ongoing.

This is my studio with a work in progress.

SHADOWS OF OUR ANCESTORS

“Large porcelain raku pot”

“Shadows of Our Ancestors” watercolor painting by kayti sweetland rasmussen

I’m not sure how I feel about so-called “ancient memory”; the qualities, gifts or understanding we may inherit from a forebear, though it is true that we certainly can inherit appearance, and certain other characteristics and mannerisms from those who have gone before.

To say that we do believe in ‘ancient memory” it would follow that if we happened to have a talent for singing, dancing, art or whatever, that it came from Great-Aunt Harriet, and not from the hours of hard work we put in every day. We could possibly just sit on our duffs and “let it come”. But I have a friend who believes implicitely that somewhere buried deep in our psyche, resides “learned memory” which can emerge with a little deep thought. Personally, I am not that deep a thinker.

The only concession I will grant however, is that the first time I plunged my hands into a pile of nice, gooey clay, I felt right at home. I was in the place I was meant to be.

Two hundred years ago, my ancestors operated a large production pottery in Devonshire, England, where along with everyday tableware, they manufactured the glaze used by the Doulton Company, which with a Royal grant, soon became “Royal Doulton.” Upon their emigration to Canada, they continued in the pottery business for many years.

Now I would never presume to believe that that is where my love of pottery came from, but then again—who knows?

It would be nice to think that through the years, our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren may somehow “know us” as people just like themselves, people who stayed out too late, ran along the beach with a friend, snuggled with a lover, were funny and silly and made mistakes, and were nice to old ladies and dogs.

The door to the past opens creakingly, but I hope they peek through to the other side now and then.

LIVING LIFE BY THE BOOK

“Islandia” is a a classic novel of utopian fiction by Austin Tappan Wright, a U.C. Berkeley Law School Professor. Written as a hobby throughout his life, it was posthumously published in 1942, after being edited down from a bulky 2300 pages! Wright created a fully realized world much like Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”, but without magic, so it is much more a utopia than a fantasy.

My friends enjoyed this book so much when they first got married and had no money, she told me, that they read it together every evening, and with the length of the book it furnished a lot of entertainment for a struggling young couple dreaming of the future.

Creating Islandia’s civilization became Wright’s lifelong leisure occupation, and included a detailed history, geography, language, geneology, literature, and culture. An amazing feat of imaginative writing.

After borrowing the book twice from my friend in the 70’s, then buying it and reading it a third time, I was thoroughly hooked on this believable civilization which lay “at the tip of the “Karain semi-continent in the Southern Hemisphere,” and which was fully accessible by an adventurous spirit, though one of the interesting factors was their rule of limiting access to Islandia to a bare one hundred visitors at a time. Now that is a brilliant concept!

Islandia’s culture has many “progressive” features. For example, prostitutes are rehabilitated back into respectable society, in this sexually permissive community. Another attractive feature is the citizen’s love of nature, which brings about their rural lives. As a confirmed city dweller, I am fascinated by the thought of living in a society where people know one another, where we grow our food, and where our homes are built and decorated with natural materials. There is handmade pottery, woven fabrics, handmade heavy wood furniture, and the larders are filled with the spoils of their gardens preserved for later use. Throughout my three readings of this book, I have lived with these people, grieved at their mishaps and deaths, and wondered what happened to the rest of us! Why didn’t we get it?

Over the four decades I have known my friends, and enjoyed the beautiful home built by them, with its handwoven wool fabrics, pottery, furniture made by the husband, heavy handhewn gates with their wrought iron hinges, I finally “got it”, they are living life by the book—living an Islandian life.

OF STEPS AND STAIRCASES

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“Staircase To Heaven” watercolor painting by kayti sweetland rasmussen

“Blue Steps” watercolor painting by kayti sweetland rasmussen

“Waves” handmade paper by kayti sweetland rasmussen

Stairs present a mystery. They can manifest man’s desire to elevate himself to the highest level, to enable him to understand his place in the world. At the top of the staircase, does he find enlightenment or—nothing? He will never know unless he climbs the steps. But the effort seems worthwhile.

In another instance, they may merely be a way to move from one level to another. It depends upon his degree of anticipation and ambition. A clay pot sitting in the sun will always be a clay pot, but it needs the white hot heat of the furnace to become porcelain.

For some, a simple life over a slightly rolling terrain may be enough to bring him fullfillment. He can relax in the familiar comfort of deep resounding sound as in ocean waves. We become like aging ships who spring a few more leaks each year.

One of the great wonders of life is the variety of aspiration and the means to achieve it.

RICH TRADITIONS OF STORYTELLING

Stories, either written or oral, are the base of our civilization Stories are limitless, and connect people from all walks of life. Cultures who had no written language had storytellers.

At a lecture by F. Scott Momaday, a Kiowa Indian, he stated that at some time in everyone’s life, he must know from where he came. The Native American has no such problem, because he has been taught the legends of his people over and over his entire life. He can recite his family tree for generations back, and can also remember and tell stories about ancestors long dead.

Stories are painted and carved on rocks throughout the world. Reminders to us that we are not unique, and that those who have gone before us left their legacies for us to interpret.

The time honored Indian pueblo pottery tradition of working with clay and telling stories has merged into a modern art form of “storyteller” pottery dolls. The art of making clay effigies is as ancient as the Anasazi peoples who inhabited the deserts of New Mexico many centuries ago. In recent history, it is the Cochiti pueblo potters who are knlown for clay effigies depicting many different aspects of their everyday life.

Helen Cordero of the Cochiti pueblo created her first ‘storyteller’ figure. Cordero’s storyteller mode was her grandfather, who gathered his grandchildren around him to play the drum, sing them songs, and tell stories of their Indian heritage and traditions.

Due to the decline of the number of speakers of native languages in various parts of the world, oral storytelling has become less common. In recent years many of the stories are written down, though many people argue that the telling of the story is just as important as the words within. Story telling, once confined to people in our own community, due to the virtue of the internet, allows us to tell our stories to people around the world.

Language is the archives of history. Ralph Waldo Emerson