Thoughts of Home

Lady in the Palazzo is a title of a book set in Umbria that I purposely did not finish when I lived there. Already knowing that I would miss our life in Umbria upon returning to Vancouver, I kept the unfinished book with me. I continue to read it now …. very slowly. I may write more about this fine gift of a book after my thoughts have settled.  

Living in Umbria was as close to home as I ever feel, anywhere. That is, anywhere you don’t really have a childhood history or share a native language. Still, I felt at home there: like a place in my heart settling into what it recognizes as home.

Today’s Thought

…life is a crafted thing, not a  willed one.

Marlena de Blasi, author of Lady in the Palazzo.

For some of us, being at home may belong to a number of select places, not one. Places you choose or that choose you. Certainly, in my case, it’s not the place of my birth. Home for me is New York City, Vancouver, San Miguel de Allende, and now rural Umbria. Not home in the factual sense of houses or flats, but home as in feelings of abiding connection with something that lives in you even when you no longer live in it. 

If home is where the heart is, perhaps then it is only the expansiveness and dedication of one's heart that defines home/s. 

After my first journey (the first sea voyage to America), over which I had not the slightest control, I’ve come to relish intentional trips of discovery (and work) in foreign places: Cuba, Guatemala, Trinidad, Belize, Costa Rica, a year in South America, four months in Singapore and Malaysia, more time-limited visits to New Zealand, Bali, Burma, Israel, Greece, Crete, Turkey, Tunisia, Morrocco, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Hungary, Switzerland, Poland, Romania, many visits to Mexico for months at a time, and several months at a time in France, Spain, and Italy. Never yet to China, Japan, Russia, India, central and south Africa. It’s a finite contest between the  pull of places you’ve been versus the temptation of entirely new places.  

Not surprisingly, so many of my paintings done this past year in Europe have themes of journey and travel in them.

Today’s Painting

Ariadne's Compass, painting by Janet Strayer

It’s not my intention to trot the globe with my footsteps, though I’m not averse to that either, if I can manage it. Perhaps I have an errant (but fortunate) gene that makes me wander, looking for home in all the right places, to alter a phrase. Perhaps it’s because I’m an immigrant, first as a toddler from Germany to the US; then as a young adult to Canada. Perhaps it’s because I am home, like a turtle carrying home with me, looking for interesting places to discover and put myself into as a new ingredient: the semi-permeable ‘self’ that happens when you allow yourself to be an interested stranger in interesting places.

The turtle remined me of a painting (below) that I made several years ago in Vancouver. I don’t really know what it “means” but I can make up a story, as can you. For me, it has something to do with a sea-surrounded muse, a remnant of land (a branch) drifting in the air beside her, an obdurate sea turtle at her service, a mischievously bemusing snake that cannot resist chattering to her from its home in a glass bottle, the inevitable winged creatures that find their way into many of my paintings, and an egg for the who-knows-what future.

Fathomless, patinting by Janet Strayer

I expect that one can travel great distances in an armchair as well as via an airplane. But there is, in the actual physical encounter with new geographies, people and animals, the distinctness one usually cannot just imagine, but needs also to remember. All those remarkable aromas, climates, vistas, foods, customs, faces, gestures: tangibles and intangibles that you sense and learn (frustration and discomfort sometimes being part of this). You may come to understand a little more, appreciate a little more. Imagination and memory build upon these experiences, but can’t alone create them.

Then, you miss them. So it is that travel begets travel.

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Words: What’s the Opposite of Onomatopoeic?

I’ve always liked words. Nor long-windedness or fussy talking, mind you. But words, those little strutting bits of sound and meaning. Long ago, when I first started to read words without pictures linked to them, some of them used to fly off the page at me.

We had a big Funk and Wagnalls dictionary in the house. I even liked the sound of that, like the sound of “Walter Cronkite”. It was an oddly reassuring and reliable 2-volume set, with its serious, navy blue cover -- though Volume 2 always seemed a little scary. The dictionary was like a book of wizardry. It held a million A to Z keys to doors I couldn’t see beyond.

I’d pick a page at random and find a word I could read but didn’t know, then see if I could understand its definition. That often led to looking up other words. But I kept it to just one word at a time. After all, I liked doing lots of other things too. Like watching cartoons and westerns and playing potsy (you might call it hopscotch) on the sidewalk.

Words I didn’t know seemed especially magical: an entry into a special world that would become visible once defined, Words had different qualities. Some had gravitas, others took flight, others sounded sneering or funny. Sometimes, given its sound, a word’s meaning let it down.

When the definition didn’t fit the impression I had from how the word sounded to me, I thought  the sense and meaning of the word had somehow gotten mixed up along the way. But more often than not, words somehow did fit their sound. Problem was, I often got the sounds wrong initally. Like thinking the US city of "Des Moines" was pronounced “Dezmoynes”.

Now, eons later, it’s still one of my little pleasures to see the ‘word of the day’ from Wordsmith.org in my daily email. Taken out of context and put bluntly on a page of messages, the chosen word stands out as unusually significant, even if you know it. So, when I saw “refulgent” listed last week, I noticed that I had a negative reaction: the word sounded off, like food gone bad. But its meaning is quite the opposite: “brilliantly shining”.

So what are words called that sound opposite to their meaning; anonomatopeic? (I like my made-up word much better than heterological, which is the appropriate one.) There's a distinct Red Queen aspect to liking words, as Alice and Lewis Carroll well knew.

You may think that I must have too much time on my hands if I’m raising such issues. Quite wrong. I have a deadline tomorrow. But words keep spinning their spells. How else to explain the popularity of the Wordsmith.org enterprise?  When I do have some time, I’d like to do a series of word-paintings. Rapp-imagery?

Today's Thought

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
Ernest Hemingway

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Why Read Blogs?

Even though I write this blog, I hardly ever read blogs on a regular basis. I started this blog on the suggestion of a friend while I lived in Europe.  It was a way of keeping contact with my friends, who enjoyed looking in on how and what I was doing. I'm very pleased to have learned that what I post gives some pleasure and information even to some people I don't know.

Frankly, though, once I  started, the process of blogging became functionally autonomous, even rather addictive. Even if no one is reading this, there's always the 'imaginary audience' to speak to. Writing it  keeps me grounded and aware that much of my creative life (ideas, paintings) is solitary but still wants to connect. 

Like many of you (and even more people who are not even reading this), I don't have much time or inclination to read blogs. There are sOOO many out there. I know I'm probably missing some really beautiful, intelligent, thoughtful, and eye-opening blogs.... but who has the time to to plod through all the stuff that keeps coming at us? The public news is bad enough to wade through, as is the terrible and misnamed 'reality show' trash that keeps getting thrown at us as "entertainment." Sometimes the  information highway just seems like a huge and honking traffic jam.


But, now and again, there are little  islands of sanity, solace, and beauty. 

Let me recommend a blog that a Finnish-Canadian artist acquaintance of mine has written for a long time. It is a beautiful, thoughtful presentation of a life being lived fully.  Marja-leena Rathje is an award-winning original printmaker with an eye for extraordinary design, and she writes so coherently too. 

A very different blog is written by my free-lance journalist and writer friend, Ruth Ellen Gruber, who lives in Italy. Ruth is the one who instigated my own blog-writing ... if you ever feel like blaming someone for it.  She has several blogs, as you can see if you type in her name at this blogspot location. But the one I want to recommend  is eccentrically interesting, focusing on one of her main interests: country and bluegrass music in Eastern Europe. It's entitled Sauerkrautcowboys Sturm, Twang and the Imaginary Wild West in Europe. 

Today's Thought

It's been my policy to view the Internet not as an 'information highway,' but as an electronic asylum filled with babbling loonies.
 Mike Royko, American Journalist (1932-1997)

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