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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