Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Home

Maps convey to the viewer that home is never far. It is always in view no matter where one is on the world. Almost as a reassuring reminder that you're never as far as you think you are. I suppose that this is not too far from the truth.

Home is always there, living inside of you. Either chasing you away or calling you back, driving you to be something or ridiculing you for being nothing.

This vision of what home means has become somewhat foggy since I've been back. I remember how crystalline it was back in Benin, the vision of my people and my home and now that crystallization has flipped back, across the ocean to my village of Aklampa.

I see the people I knew frozen in time, going through their daily activities and it's as if I was never there, just a ghost.

Americans, generally, don't have this connection or rootedness to homes. We live in a mobile society, a pioneer society, ready to be moved at an order. The living and breathing quality of being planted to a place, a particular patch of dirt, is not as common amongst us as in other societies.

It is only when one leaves and sees what goodness this brings to life that this way of living is rightly appreciated. People say that home is where the heart is, perhaps a better way to put it is that home is in the heart, a coal that seldom burns out but always blazes inside one's self. You learn to love at home, to cry, to regret. In short to live. Home is life.