Already Home: A Topography of Spirit and Place

by Barbara Gates

This powerfully moving memoir explores the connections between local history, the environment, the body, and the spirit. Intertwining themes of love and family, home and homelessness, neighborhood and lost wilderness, Barbara Gates takes the reader on a journey of personal discovery that artfully bridges the inner and outer worlds of experience. Prompted by a diagnosis of breast cancer and the accompanying recognition of mortality, Gates follows an intuition that her own life is simply an expression of the changing terrain. She researches far-ranging elements of her Berkeley, California, surroundings: the geological history of the Bay and hills, the history of her house and neighborhood, and the shellmound home of Native Americans who inhabited her area five thousand years ago. Encounters with a homeless woman who sleeps in her car, a rat in her refrigerator, and other adventures alternate with explorations of the area and its history. Gates seeks out original shorelines long since changed by landfill, original creeks that have been run into sewers, and diverse local wildlife now at risk from the pollution of industry and traffic. Looking through the lens of Buddhist mindfulness practice, Gates inspires readers to take a big view of where we live—one that includes the past and future. She helps us to appreciate the heartache and grace of daily life and to find for ourselves that at any moment we might realize that we are already home.

Genres: Buddhism

208 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2003

Reviews

[Kasey Jueds · Rating 4 out of 5]

A hard book to categorize... part memoir, part history of the Berkeley neighborhood where the author lives, part geography, part spirituality. I ended up really liking it, though I was not sure I was going to initially; the beginning seemed kind of unfocused, but the way Barbara Gates moves between subjects--in an nonlinear, almost dreamy fashion--really grew on me. Beautiful, lyrical... I've never read another book like it.

[Becca Feldhacker · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this just wasn’t the right time for me to read a book like this. I had a hard time connecting with it 75% of the time, and while I wonder how it ends I had to throw in the towel. Too many good books to read to make myself read something I’m not connecting with.