Home

I live in a city where homelessness is a major concern. I am fortunate to have a home, a steady income, and an overall sense of security.

I grew up in a home that had been in my family for three generations. It was an old farm house on (you guessed it) a farm. I grew up on ninety acres covered in trees and grass. My home was not only where I lived, but it was the place where my closest family was and where my closest friends would visit.

I remember my first big move away from home. Specifically one year after begin away, I was able to say with confidence that home wasn't a specific place, but a feeling or an emotion in my heart. I had moved one thousand miles away from the home and community that I had grown up in, and as much as that was "home," I began to realize that home was more that a house or a zip code.

That sense of security had to do with feeling at home with the new friends I had made; feeling at home in the work I was doing; and of course feeling at home in my apartment and neighborhood.

Feeling at home. Feeling. Home is a feeling. When making a deeper emotional connection with "home" I can't help but think of the homeless people in New York and across the country who suffer from mental and emotional illness. They are physically without a home, and they also struggle with finding a sense of emotional security that I have identified as my "home." How much greater is the challenge to finding a "home" when you cannot afford the rent, and you don't know how to spend emotional energy on a sense of security?

Roll Over Me

Water. I like to drink it, to walk in it, to make art with it. Water gives life. Water soothes and cools. Water sustains. The sounds that water makes, from raindrops on tin roofs to waves rolling onto the shore, are subtle reminders of nature's presence in our lives.

There was a pond in the front yard of our farm house when I was growing up. I remember creeping to the pond's edge hoping to see a frog or a fish in the shallow water. We would row ourselves around in the water in a green row boat or float in tubes on hot summer days.

One of my favorite experiences with water is at the beach. I love standing on the shore and watching the waves roll in. The photo above is of the Pacific Ocean from the shore of Venice Beach in California. There is a peaceful rhythm to the water near the shore. An inviting "wave" summons me closer. I'm teased by the water as it laps to the shore. I jump over the first little wave, and step even further into the water.

The waves seem endless. They roll over the rough sand and collide with whatever or whomever is in their path. The waves are cleansing. They wash the sand from my feet. They rush to sweep my spirit clean of what stains it. The waves move over me and carry me back into the great waters of the ocean. As I stand on the shore and long for refreshment from the water I find myself moved; my soul shifted.

My feelings seem endless. They roll over the rough spots in my life and collide with whatever or whomever is in their path. My thoughts of worry are cleansed by calm. Feelings quench a longing for intimacy and compassion. Feelings of passion roll over me and invite me into the great ocean that is life.

Loss

Loss. You have something important to you taken away. Your team doesn't score the winning run or goal or point. You misplace something and cannot find it, which happened quite frequently in my home as I was growing up. Not a week went by when my mother, brother and sister and I weren't caught up in a frantic search for my father's glasses or his keys.

I've lost touch with friends over the years. More to the point, I lost some of the things that we had in common. I (or they) moved away and we started new lives in new places.

Loss has different degrees of severity. Some losses are easy to recover from. Your sense of self remains more intact after a loss of lesser value than after a loss of greater value. And, the value most definitely doesn't have to be monetary. The emotional or intrinsic value of someone or something can be priceless.

The loss of my dad has so far been the hardest loss of my life.

I can remember the last time I saw him. I was home visiting for the holidays from Mississippi. At the time I was only visiting my family for holidays and family events like weddings, and sadly, funerals. It was a cold January day just after New Year's, and he and my mother had taken me to the airport. With all of the security lines and barriers in place my parents stood off to the side as I walked through the security screening to my gate. I glanced back and waved at my parents through the plexi-glass. That was the last time I saw my dad.

We talked on the phone three to four times a week when I was in Mississippi. We spoke for the last time a day before he died. I remember the conversation. It was textbook foreshadowing. "You know," he said, "The medicine I'm taking...This book says it can be fatal."

My father had invested in a large pharmaceutical dictionary a few years earlier when he was first diagnosed with a heart problem. He had a pacemaker and took a cocktail of drugs, including the fatal one.

There was no clear reason for his death, or my loss. There were many unanswered questions, but in my mind there was one clear answer to all of them: I had lost my dad. Whether he was slowly killed by heart medication, or hit by a car, the outcome was the same. He was dead and he was my loss.

Loss is one of the deepest feelings I have ever experienced. As I am writing this I can feel the loss well up inside of me. It rises from somewhere deep in my belly, over my heart and chest, and erupts with tears in my eyes.

I usually end an essay with a resolution of some sort that would tie the story together and leave a feeling of completion. That's not as easy to do this time. I believe that loss and the feelings of grief and sadness that can accompany loss do not go away. Loss has changed me and I live with it every day. Some days the feelings erupt, and most days they don't. Either way, I live with the loss. I guess in some ways it is one of the connections that I still have with my dad. The notion of his loss and missing him assure me that he is still here.

Fashions of Peace

I recently attended an anti-militarism fashion show at a conference in Los Angeles.

I consider myself a stylish person, a bit of a fashion connoisseur. The fashion show highlighted how subtle messages of militarism pervade our culture through fashion. There are other subtle messages: Hummers rolling down the highway, and military toys for children. Living in a country at war on foreign soil, the reality of war sometimes seems far away. However, the camouflage, the vehicles, and the language and trappings of war have invaded popular culture.

Check out an article I wrote about the fashion show.