Home

I have always resonated greatly with the word home. I like how the word sounds, and I like what it encircles in the arms of its loose and gathered meanings.

My invitation to You:

In any artform that you choose, or in several, play creatively with the concept of home. What does it mean to you?

Suggested process:

1. Begin with journaling for 12 minutes on the word home, everything you associate with it, all the pain, all the echoes, all the layers

2. Looking back over your writing, highlight some images and themes that emerge and speak to you today, that have some resonations of meaning, assistance, or beauty for you at this particular place of pause

3. Create an artwork (or start of an artwork), or temporal piece (such as a movement or other kind of improvisation) that captures some of your personal contact with the topic.

I have two examples to share of my own process play.

1 is a poem start. It may later become something else, or it may not. Either way it has served its structural purpose of capturing a sense of home, one facet of the symbol as it is important to me personally.

2 is a song I ended up putting on the album Auguries.

Enjoy, dear friends.

1. Home, a Poem Start

You, the one perfect place,
friendly guide to all places,
who used to afford my flows,
the frondy slowness of rivers, mine and others'

who sang simple pieces
of sagebrush and harmony to me,
who wore feathered oak trees in great numbers
slanting comfortably together

who are woven on a tree of lights,
like woolly grass on the loom,

you are presently closed
to me now.

Two large doors clicked shut.
A room for living was tucked away
inside the breast of a building.
I see the lights are on

candles are warm

the chandelier is swinging
with vibrations, maybe dancing
or loud murmuring, dirging

or calling in the next world
a deep swath
of sound. 

I walk away from you, loving you
leaving you

nested.
May you be protected and whole,
nourished, from a spring
that soaks kindly into your soily root.
Remain intact,

because the rest of us broken types
walk recklessly through the dark
shirts open over our blackened hearts

We are rocked in the sucking and swells
of what came, now patched
what will not

come again, but is remembered
fully as it leaves us.

Death is lonely and feckless
no tree goes unrotted
no gift left in its nature-birthed form
no leaf of grass

resting where it landed.

You murmur and glow,
even if I can't have you.

One day I may find myself
stepping unexpectedly

into your circles of gold
and green water again,

the sun bleaching
sheets of grass, our structures ground to nubs,

and we may meet in loving collapse

recognizing you,
knowing you

as our own
long-missed

home.

2. Home, a Completed Song

Lyrics:

There is a light at the back of my throat

and I'm going to let it out, like a parachute

out over the land, with silken strings unmanned,

to fall on those who want it to.

All like lights to come home

to one light, united.

Home, home, home.

There is a spell at the back of my mouth

and I'm going to send it out,

and let its voice fly high and fine,

until it finds my lonely kind.

The ones who pine with hearts full up

to call a mind of wholeness up,

and down into breathing trees

into living lands,

we'll come home as one life, united.

Thank you for reading, beloved.

-

Thumbnail image respectfully borrowed from The Wonderful Things You Will Be, by Emily Winfield Martin.