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I'm really not quite sure what the role of a third (which I often seem to take) is in these Serendip conversations: not there for the original lunch or dinner party discussion, but intrigued by the report of its aftermath, pausing to listen in, just long enough (as Kenneth Burke once famously said) to put in my oar, then pass on by...

Passing by this time, I was caught by the distinction between "perch" and "home," in large part because it seemed curiously analogous to an image that grabbed me during a wedding I attended this weekend, an image that might help build a bridge between perches and homes.



Standing there under a chuppah made of fish net, the rabbi @ this wedding pointed out that "no one would mistake it for a home": it's full of holes, fragile, responsive to wind, held only temporarily by family members....the newly married couple will clearly need to supply their own support.

In the terms of the conversation here, the chuppah is the perch, a place to take off from, in that it is only the sketch for the real shelter. And the home is defined neither by the materials of which it is made, nor by the vista it offers, but rather but by the commitment of the people to it and one another. This would be perch as prelude to home, outline for the relationship that will be nurtured within it.

As Marge Piercy says in her Chuppah Poem, it is
...like a tent
under which we work
not safe but no longer solitary
in the searing heat of our time....

[But, as importantly, it preserves this perch-like quality:]
...It is not a dead end.
Therefore the chuppah has no walls.
We have made a home together
open to the weather of our time.

This sounds so hopeful, but I've also been reading a darker version of this tale, about a home open not only to "the weather outside," but to what is troubling within us...