How shelter creates community
Because no one survives alone
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here
and you must treat it as a powerful stranger.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the word shelter. Shelter in place, the idea of sheltering, of the shelter we seek in times of chaos, and that which we provide for others. For some, it may immediately evoke a place of calm and comfort. For others, it can be community or home. And for some it can be imposing and unwanted, a place of confinement and isolation, interrupting freedom. When I hear shelter my thoughts go immediately to the storm, the winds and rain that make it so welcome.
The etymology of the word shelter has within it ideas of structure and protection. Even further back, to Middle and Old English, the root of shelter comes from the words sheldtrume — a roof or wall formed by locked shields. What I find interesting about the root of the word is its battle context, of forming a defensive position, yet it’s a position of doing so with the help of others, joined in one structure, creating roof, wall. How shelter is made from the long-ago formation of linking shields in battle. To create something larger than what one individual could achieve is at the heart of what shelter really means. A roof, a wall. Protection.
Not long ago I was thinking about the trees stripping down as the end of fall arrived. How papery the yellow leaves were lining the street gutter. Moving in the wind, they seemed to call to the branches they just fell from, ready to have the winter come but not yet ready to give over the landscape entirely. And then the stray fallen leaves finding their way across the threshold of our house as my son came in from the new cold. The leaves threshed from the tree branches so the core can be revealed, smoothed and ready to withstand.
When the cold comes, we turn to home, to shelter. We let down, and turn towards comfort, bundling ourselves in layers of protection with blankets, sweaters, parkas, softness. And yet the trees face the hardest season bared to the skin, all clothing and protection left on the ground. As if daring the winter to arrive and do its worst, the trees stand in skeletal relief, stronger without fur or feather.
David Wagoner, in his poem Lost, writes:
“it is the rooted things — trees and bushes — that tell the truth to the person who is lost.”
I was reminded of that line and poem as I thought about the trees as they prepared for winter. They share the truth of their frames, rooted above and below, knowing earth and sky. In the last days of fall, they simply are — standing in greeting to the powerful, familiar but indifferent stranger of winter. Bared and knowing, the trees witness the cold and the dark with the truth of who they are.
In trying to make sense of the chaos that has arrived at our thresholds, of the powerful and maddeningly indifferent stranger that has made itself a home in so many of our bodies, I thought again of the trees, still bare outside my windows this afternoon as I write in Alaska. Spindled branches networked, a shield of locked limbs stretched across the view.
Wilderness is often invoked as a lonely space. Remote, removed. It so often presumes a place of isolation, of being alone. Heroes are tested in wilderness, overcoming it, withstanding its isolation alone. The word wilderness itself situates us as separate from it, the opposite of society. It asks to be looked at from a remove, to approach its wildness alone — the myth of rugged individualism shadowed in its vastness. But as a friend said, in his Indigenous culture everyone knows that no one survives alone. Alaska’s Indigenous peoples have been able to live and thrive for centuries, understanding that wilderness is the shelter, and people make a home in it. Wilderness has always involved many.
It is in the shadow of each other that the people live.
Padraig O’Tuama, an Irish poet, writes that in the Irish language, the word scath can mean both shelter and shadow. That “…our shelter can be our shadow; or even, what shelters me may shadow you.” How do we share shelter, share the network of wilderness, share the same space of chaos recognizing that our shields can also cast a shadow — that interlocked, they may protect against one attack but could prevent the approach of something that isn’t intended to wound? Or mistakenly cause damage where there should be none.
The distance we’re experiencing now, it can be a shelter. We shelter in our homes if we’re fortunate to have ones that are warm and dry and safe, not shared with someone who will cause harm without protection or the routine of every day, of access to others (because one shield against many is a slim defense). But what shadow is cast on those who have no home or shelter to isolate in? How do we find shelter and shadow, accept both meanings, hidden in the new world we’re distancing ourselves in?
Ideas of shade, protection, shelter, shadow, shield — and even of mist, fog, and ghosts — build a new kind of shelter. Of pause. The space that has arrived with this chaos. Of being forced into pause, into the shadow of a bright world that is always on. The word shadow is rooted in the idea of a darkness cast by someone or something (e.g., a shelter), between an object and a source of light. But shadow can also stand for mystery, unknowing, the in-between. As early as the 13th century, shadow is used to explain anything unreal; by the mid-14th century, it is synonymous for ghost.
Sometimes it is these ghosts, the shadows of our experience that need space to breathe and remind. Of the laced patterns tree branches make on the walls as the light of afternoon dims and winds usher in a storm.
Jun’ichiro Tanizaki wrote a treatise on shadows. In Praise of Shadows is a slim and beautiful testament — or lament — to the significance of shadows in Japanese aesthetics, architecture, food. Tanizaki writes:
In making ourselves a place to live, we first spread a parasol to throw a shadow on the earth, and in the pale light of the shadow we put together a house.
First the shadow, then the shelter. Tanizaki continues:
the quality we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s ends.
Without the shadow, the light essentially blinds us to what is real. We can’t live in stark, constant light. In our hunger for exposure, to understand and know and be seen, we abandon mystery, ghosts, and the wonder of implication. We need the pause, to allow room for reflection on experience, for the silence in which to think, imagine, connect and be reminded of what and who has been here before us — and who is around us now.
Ultimately it is the magic of shadows. Were the shadows to be banished from its corners, the alcove would in that instant revert to mere void. — Tanizaki
This isn’t to say that there is some way to easily make sense of what we’re facing right now. Only to remember the shelters and shadows that are always with us. That in the shelters we construct, there is a shadow cast — both elements moving amongst us, bringing definition that is indifferent to us. To create mystery at times, and to lead us to understand something with more definition than we would have in flat light. The danger would be to lose sight of both — to trade one for the other. To miss that the shelter we seek may also unleash a shadow for others. Or that a shadow can bring shelter to eyes weary of the sun.
It is in the shelter of each other that the people live.
We try to create our own shelters, our own island wildernesses to stay safe and be tested. But we never do it alone. We stay home, we shelter in place, we watch the shadows change across the rooms and notice the shift in patterns as branches grow heavy with bud. We realize the shadow of all who are supporting the shelter we seek to keep, of how essential the work is that we had once dismissed in the light of oblivious health. How tenuous the walls of our shelter are when we pretend they are solely ours.
The shelter we keep is creating a shelter and shield for others. A pause for some, intense action for others. A shelter of quiet for some, while other shelters are newly created, doors opened and beds prepared for those who had none. A confinement for others, the reality of their shelter suddenly starker without the shadow of the outside world to protect. The shelter and the shadow remind us of what we all need, what the intention of shelter truly is — shields and shadow joined together. That we cannot, do not live alone, in constant unapologetic light. We need the space of rest, of shadow, of each other to reach across the wilderness and find that nothing is ever alone, nor should it be.
