![\"IMG_1245\"](\"http:\/\/www.brendanmyers.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/IMG_1245.jpg\")
<\/a>\nFor 31 years, this was my family’s home.<\/p>\n
I’ll post a few stories of growing up here, over the next few weeks or so, maybe. Meanwhile, here’s my sister Nuala’s very fine story of what our house meant to us<\/a>. Also, if you will forgive the hucksterism, here is a selection from my 2010 book, Circles of Meaning<\/a><\/em>, in which I described what it means to have a home.<\/p>\n As a child, in my free hours after school, or on weekends when I had no responsibilities, I would ride my bicycle all over every street in my village. Perhaps this is because I had many brothers and sisters, and therefore could not find true privacy in the house. But it\u2019s also true that I wanted to explore the village everywhere, and claim it as my own. My family moved to the village a week before my ninth birthday. By the time I was ten, I knew the streets by the shape of the cracks and potholes. I knew the houses by the friendly and unfriendly dogs that would bark at my passing. I knew the bushes where wild raspberries grew. In the winter I knew the shapes of the snow drifts, and the best toboggan hills, and I knew spring was coming when the cedar trees threw off the snow that covered their boughs. There was a conservation area to the west of the village. It started at the place where the Grand River cut a deep gorge through the limestone, eighty feet deep, and it went on forever. I knew this terrain as intimately as I knew the streets and tracks and parks of the village itself. I knew the sinkholes and shallow caves where I could hide, together with a stash of pebbles to throw at passing tourists. I knew how to race through the trees at top speed without crashing into the crags and steppes. I knew the overlooks and plateaus where I could watch the beaten paths, unseen. I invented names for those places, and stories of battles and romances and escapes from danger that happened there. And I had a regular route that took me to each one, in its sequence, like a sentry on guard. These were my sacred places, and this was my land.<\/p>\n The Elora Gorge Conservation Area is where I made the first intellectual and emotional discoveries which deserve to be called \u2018spiritual\u2019. What made the landscape spiritual was not something supernatural: I was not seeing visions or experiencing trance states. Nor was there something new every time I explored it. Moreover, the forest was not untouched by civilization. Paved roads, water wells, stone walls, campsites with electric hook-ups, and other signs of human management could be found everywhere. Some of the landmarks of my route included a ruined stone factory, a ruined mill race, and a hand-pumped water well. (That well, by the way, has been filled in, and an unspiritual pressurized tap in a concrete base was installed nearby to replace it. I\u2019m annoyed.)<\/p>\n Yet I think that I knew, somewhere in my childhood mind, that when I raced through the trees on the riverside at full speed, or when I scaled the cliffs of the gorge without any safety harnesses, or did any number of reckless and dangerous things with no thought of injury or death \u2014 on those days I knew that I was strong. What is more \u2014 when I set out and ran my regular path from one secret place to the next, and saw that all was in order, I was most truly myself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last week, for my 40th birthday, I visited Elora, the village where I grew up, and which I still think of as “home”. My parents have sold the house, and after they move out it will be much harder for … Continue reading <\/a>
\nThe window in the library – the room in which I decided to be a writer, and wrote my first stuff.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nThe library. For the computer nerds out there: yes, that is a fully functioning Apple LC-475, on the desk.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nLiving room.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nA path in “my” forest, the Elora Gorge Conservation Area.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nThat path leads to this landmark: “Hole in the Rock”. (Such an imaginative name.)<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nCedar tree roots growing over a rocky ridge.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nThe much-photographed merging of the Irvine and Grand rivers, overlooked by Lover’s Leap. <\/p>\n<\/a>
\nThis small plateau is the exact spot<\/em> where I had a number of “spiritual experiences” (for lack of a better word) for the first time in my life. It is the very place where, at the age of 17, I thought I could hear the voice of Herself, in the trees above and the rapids below. And so I decided to become a philosopher.<\/p>\n