Portland Magazine
February 22, 2023
A few years ago, after my wife and I married and had our first kid, we bought the house I grew up in. I think of this house as a sacred space.
Story by Sam Mowe '22
A FEW YEARS ago, after my wife and I married and had our first kid, we bought the house I grew up in. I think of this house—the Monteith House—as a sacred space. Holy things have happened here in the past and they continue to happen here now.
In between these two stints of family-making, I left on a fifteen-year pilgrimage of sorts (from Los Angeles to India to Nepal to New York City and back to Portland). In the midst of going to school and working various jobs, I was also looking for holy places that would make me feel whole. I spent some of this time at pilgrimage sites—like Bodh Gaya, India, where the Buddha reached enlightenment—where I learned that holy places maintain a golden thread of meaning through time, without clinging to either past or present. In this impermanent world, stories, rituals, and traditions (the things that we say and do, and the places where we put our bodies over and over again) are as close as we can get to continuity.
Years ago, the Monteith House had a tradition we called Happy Days. Each of us three children got our own special day where we’d receive presents, sit in the front seat of my parents’ car, eat whatever we wanted for dinner (my personal favorite: raw cookie dough and orange juice concentrate straight from the can), and bask in an improvisational family performance of the gospel version of “Oh Happy Day” while everyone banged on pots and pans. (This tradition was created in response to all of us having the same birthday, a fact that always felt both auspicious and disappointing.)
Today the Monteith House is home to a young family of four, a family that’s creating origin stories and traditions of its own. Our days are filled with routines that function like rituals and keep us grounded in the present. School lunches are made in the morning (Lila’s sandwich on the left, Ruthie’s on the right), backyard chickens are herded into the coop at dusk, and at bedtime we play hide-and-seek and sing YouTube karaoke.
We continue to renovate the Monteith House. Whenever something breaks, we fix it. “It’s a completely different house!” my mom says when she comes over. And while she means it in a nice way, I find that I resist this interpretation, because, for me, this house is a symbol of the continuity of my family. Is it the same house? Is it a different house? Buddhists say that identity isn’t fixed, that it’s impermanent and dependent on relationships between other changing identities. But I can trace a golden thread of meaning from playing tag with my mom to hiding-and-seeking with my children today.
At the end of a pilgrimage, you return home. Arriving again, I open the front door and see Lila running toward me from the same (but remodeled) kitchen, across the same floor, and suddenly I remember being her but this time I’m the dad. I crouch down and throw my arms out wide ready to catch her.
SAM MOWE (Nonprofit MBA ’22) is the publisher at Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.
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