Ruby in Sofia-being on exchange
It has been two months since my arrival in Sofia, Bulgaria, and I have found myself in a position that I have never experienced before: I have the task of creating a home from square one, from a place where I live as a newcomer and near stranger. In being an inhabitant of a place for 8 months, there is a choice to be made between being a citizen and being a visitor. It’s too easy in a globalized world where English is near ubiquitous and familiar faces available regardless of distance to live like a water strider, moving functionally but never diving into what lies beneath. So if home is to be made, it has to be done in a more conscious way than before. And though I don’t feel that I am in any position to give advice on this process after just over one month here, there has been one thought that I have been mulling over recently. This is that land itself might be able to provide a coherent structure for the experience of home. My experience of the United States is less rooted in culture (after all, what we have of traditional food, or dance, or national identity, is so pluralistic that I feel in no way prepared to claim understanding) than the land itself. I grew up in a small town in Northern California and spent much of my childhood in the forests, rivers, and beaches of that landscape. I feel a lot of love for the land that, I believe, played a very important role in the creation of who I am. Since coming here, I have found that my memories from before are deeply tied to the places in which they happened, and when I return, I hope to feel something similar for this place and its people: a cohesion, a wovenness with the place itself.
In the search for a new home, I feel that we can learn more than we realize from developing rootedness in the physical environment that surrounds us. In 1949, the ever-relevant Aldo Leopold wrote the Sand County Almanac, an ode to the earth and creatures of his Wisconsin homeland. For 12 months, he described with great care the changing of his farm and the habits of its citizens. Each of us might benefit from applying this same attentiveness to the physical, ever-changing geography in which our lives and selves exist. And what better opportunity than the transition to a new land? In celebration of the cocreation of place between the individual and the environment, here are some instances where I have felt myself at home in Bulgaria:
Cheshma
Above Sofia looms (in a non-menacing way) Vitosha Mountain, with a peak elevation of 7,513 ft. In these past few weeks, I have been lucky enough to do a considerable amount of hiking there. One of the things I wasn’t expecting to find was a collection of manmade springs, some honored by shrines. They dot the mountain at what seems to be semi-regular intervals, making it possible to rely on the availability of potable water miles from the city. They are referred to as ‘cheshma.’ This is the feeling of home: to be able to hike alone and know where to find water, and to know these places and landmarks keep you from becoming lost.
Baba Binka
Here, I spend many an afternoon with my host grandmother, Baba Binka. She is one of the few people I know who doesn’t speak a word of English, and it is such a blessing. She is incredibly patient with my scattered knowledge of Bulgarian, and thankfully lacks the ability to switch to English when I can’t think of a word right away. In large part because of her, my ability to converse is coming along at a respectable pace. However, the difficulty of speech has encouraged us to find alternative methods of building a relationship. Together we are sculpting, and painting said sculptures. I am making her a salamander and an otter, since they are creatures of my homeland. We will decorate her apartment and my room with them. Soon she will begin teaching me how to knit, in part because she thinks I don’t dress warmly enough. We will make a shawl for me to wear. This is the feeling of home: to have ritual, to go somewhere and create something over time, in a specific place, for a specific person.
Golyama Zhelaznya
One thing I love about Bulgaria is how many families maintain some level of engagement with ‘their village,’ usually a place where one or more of their parents or grandparents grew up, and their parents before them, and so on. It is not unusual to have an inherited village home that they visit regularly. My family recently brought me to theirs, in a village named Golyama Zhelaznya. They keep bees and a small garden; some years, a nearby neighbor raises a pig on their behalf. They know almost everybody who lives or has a home there. When we went, it was the time for harvesting chestnuts from the trees which they visit yearly. They are hidden among the leaves that fell at the same time, so we begin by raking (depicted in the picture above), and then begin our searching through the grass. Chestnuts are coated in dark, finger-staining fruits, which we remove as we toss them in bags to carry home for washing. They show me the edible berry bushes and local cheshma. This is the feeling of home: knowing what is edible and how to find it, knowing what happens at this time of the year and what will come of it later.
Here, the familiar ties that connect one aspect of life to the next are cut and must be woven anew. The feeling of self is similarly frayed: unable to communicate fluently in the local language, speech becomes at once more valuable and less important; placed into a new family, attentiveness to situation is required at all times, with all people. Grouped with a cohort of fellow Americans, the realization sets in that one might have as much in common with those of another country as with those of one’s ‘homeland.’ So we begin again: making home. Maybe experiences such as these can help us do that.