Coming Home - a late post containing something of April

"May I remind you, May I remind that you've got nowhere to go, So I'm staying beside you, I'm staying beside you 'til you find a way back home.." 

- Kaiser Chiefs

The flowers of the field - April 2014

"Mrs Winterson left behind things that she could not do. 
One of those things was to make a home.
The Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade talks about home - ontological as well as geographical home - and in a lovely phrase, he calls home "the heart of the real". 
Home, he tells us is the intersection of two lines - the vertical and the horizontal. The vertical plane was heaven, or the upper world, at one end, and the world of the deal at the other end. The horizontal plane is the traffic of this world, moving to and fro - our own traffic and that of teeming others. 
Home was a place of order. A place where to order of things come together - the living and the dead - the spirits of the ancestors and the present inhabitants, and the gathering up and stilling of all the to-and-fro. 
Leaving home can only happen because there is a home to leave. And the leaving is never just a geographical or spatial separation; it is an emotional separation - wanted or unwanted. Steady or ambivalent.
For the refugee, for the homeless, the lack of this crucial co-ordinate in the placing of the self has severe consequences. At best it must be managed, made up for in some way. At worst, a displaced person, literally, does not know which way is up, because there is no true north. No compass point,. Home is much more than shelter; home is our centre of gravity. 
A nomadic people learn to take their homes with them - and the familiar objects are spread out or re-erected from place to place. When we move house, we take with us the invisible concept of home - but it is a very powerful concept. Mental health and emotional continuity do not require us to stay in the same house or the same place, but they do require a sturdy structure on the inside - and that structure is built in part by what has happened on the outside. The inside and the outside of our lives are each the shell where we learn to live."               

- Jeanette Winterson (Why be happy when you  could be normal?)

 "And we're dancing on the finest line,
Between the chance of the time of our lives,
Wishing you were done, oh no, gotta run..."

- Kaiser Chiefs (Coming Home)

“At the center of your being
you have the answer;
you know who you are
and you know what you want.”

― Lao Tzu