I think I’ve been searching for home since the day I was born. With the exception of graduate school, I’ve never quite felt like I belonged anywhere. It's as though I’ve had to live in others’ worlds for much of my life: The world most people inhabit, the world that can be seen and touched and proven. The one I’m more comfortable within, though, is that of things invisible: Shadows and depth, inner experience, spiritual dimensions, and beauty, for example. Yet, like most of the world, I too dismiss or minimize this attunement, thereby denying my innermost reality all on my own. A survival mechanism I suppose, constructed to protect me from the potential humiliation of stepping into my dreams and desires only to be rejected or made to feel foolish. I developed a staunch practicality as a result of this fear, which has helped me to navigate the external world even as it has simultaneously squashed the dreamer in me.
Connecting with the dreamer within feels dangerous, exposing me to the pain of humiliation, disappointment, and jugement of myself as selfish, as well as regret over a life chosen from a place that ignored the dreamer... a place that wasn’t entirely me. Yet I know that it is from this place that I wish to create this next, literal version of home. And so I promise myself that I'll not give up the dreams completely. I promise that I will incorporate elements of that less-visible-dimension into my present life & new home. I promise to play a part in this process of creating home from a place rooted in all of me.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Saturday, May 22, 2010
The Fantasy...& A Beginning
I'm not sure that I should be starting this blog with a post about a fantasy that is far away from the home I'm about to create, but it's a fantasy that will color... perhaps taint... all moving forward from here. It seems, if nothing else, an honest place to begin.
In the midst of my husband's and my search for a more permanent place to call home and the immense struggle this has engendered for me, I asked myself to imagine what my ideal home might be. Somewhat surprisingly, my imagination, or unconscious, drew up a picture of a Thoreau-like shack in the midst of a clearing within the woods: Sunny, yet private. The shack is one room, and to describe it as sparsely furnished is an understatement. There is a mattress in the corner and pillows scattered on the floor for seating.
And it is beautiful.
I buy yards and yards of lovely fabric and hang it from the ceiling while I line the perimeter of the floor with white candles, which I light every night. (Because it’s fantasy, I don’t worry too much about the fabric igniting and burning the place down.)
And I live with a guy—it was originally his shack, and he invites me to be with him. In the original fantasy he is a glass-blower; though sometimes he shows up as a musician. Either way, he’s the creative type: The kind of guy who forgoes wealth and the accumulation of material things for the sake of his craft; uncompromising in his creativity, and in his life. I get to play the role of muse, sometimes helping to write song lyrics or inspire the color of his glass, always inspiring him to bridge the possible and the real via his imagination. And we understand each other without talking. Present between us is what I might describe as a soul connection that we both just feel. And I realize that that's home—the connection, the understanding, the belonging. I further realize that, fantasy or not, it doesn't matter much if my fabric catches fire and burns the place down, because home will still be there, in that invisible something between & connecting us.
The creation of my actual new home, which is about to begin, is happening against the backdrop of this fantasy.
I'm doing my best not to compare reality to something that does not exist.
In the midst of my husband's and my search for a more permanent place to call home and the immense struggle this has engendered for me, I asked myself to imagine what my ideal home might be. Somewhat surprisingly, my imagination, or unconscious, drew up a picture of a Thoreau-like shack in the midst of a clearing within the woods: Sunny, yet private. The shack is one room, and to describe it as sparsely furnished is an understatement. There is a mattress in the corner and pillows scattered on the floor for seating.
And it is beautiful.
I buy yards and yards of lovely fabric and hang it from the ceiling while I line the perimeter of the floor with white candles, which I light every night. (Because it’s fantasy, I don’t worry too much about the fabric igniting and burning the place down.)
And I live with a guy—it was originally his shack, and he invites me to be with him. In the original fantasy he is a glass-blower; though sometimes he shows up as a musician. Either way, he’s the creative type: The kind of guy who forgoes wealth and the accumulation of material things for the sake of his craft; uncompromising in his creativity, and in his life. I get to play the role of muse, sometimes helping to write song lyrics or inspire the color of his glass, always inspiring him to bridge the possible and the real via his imagination. And we understand each other without talking. Present between us is what I might describe as a soul connection that we both just feel. And I realize that that's home—the connection, the understanding, the belonging. I further realize that, fantasy or not, it doesn't matter much if my fabric catches fire and burns the place down, because home will still be there, in that invisible something between & connecting us.
The creation of my actual new home, which is about to begin, is happening against the backdrop of this fantasy.
I'm doing my best not to compare reality to something that does not exist.
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