Unpacking

That sun --- that bright, familiar southern sun --- welcomes me home this morning. I need to get outside and enjoy it while I catch up on work I haven't looked at for seven days. In the guest room with the oil painted roses in their delicate shades of pink, I perch with my computer and try to decide what I should do first. Sleep tempts me, a shower says I need to get clean and spirited, and in my mind the question, "What does it mean to come home?" It's more of a spiritual question than a practical one, although there are certain practicalities involved: the unpacking, for instance. Unpacking involves remembering and reflecting.

A.E. Housman expressed this idea of the mental unpacking necessary when coming home from a country one has loved here:

So there is some sadness associated with this coming home from certain remembered hills and farms, from happy highways, even though I come to a happy home. To a certain extent, I am followed by that distant country and its shining plain, and I welcome being followed.

Two expressions appear in my memory when I use the word "unpack" -- 1) in regard to a recent doctoral proposal draft of mine, the chair of my doctoral committee said to the second (reluctant) member, "Do you want her to unpack her variables?" and 2) in Hamlet, the prince, feeling he is a coward unable to act says that he instead "... must like a whore unpack my heart with words."

This concept of unpacking hearts and variables implies that there is an alternative, which is to keep these closed. Hamlet's assertion that he would do better to act than to run his mouth and curse the darkness is understandable. However, it's an idea that is generally unpopular with poets, who love to go on and on in words trying to understand and interpret this life and its madnesses. We have an endless bounty of words to use as tools and surveyors. In fact, to speak is to act --- to write is also.

As I begin the unpacking from my trip to Ireland, I am also unpacking my heart and my variables, with all of their fabrics and colors, the clean and unclean, the forgotten items purchased.