Vabagond: On Home

Home. Home is a fire, a burning reminder, of where we belong, love. With walls built up around us, the bricks make me nervous, they're only so strong, love. Plates they will shift, houses will shake, fences will drift, we will awake, only to find, nothing's the same as yesterday.
-Death Cab for Cutie "Home is a Fire"

I have been slightly homeless as of late. Not that my family isn't taking care of me, that's not a problem. In fact, the problem has less to do with a lack of a physical center as much as it does a lack of some emotional centrality. Allow me to give a bit of back story. You see, I am currently living between two cities that are about an hours drive from one another. Seeing as how this particular epoch is following one of bumming off of some friends on their couch, in their home office, etc, for a few weeks, it gives a particular sort of ambiance to my life that I find both liberating and dissolving, diluting--depleting, perhaps. What a paradox. As I come to know my own self, and find respite in 'doing my own thing', I almost have a sense of a dissolving, diluting, and depleting of the things that once held a great deal of value to me. It is like pouring liquid from one vessel to another. One fills while the other depletes. There is no replenishing effect at work.

Yesterday morning I boarded a plane in San Francisco that was bound for Long Beach with a connection to SLC. As the plane taxied around the runways, I decided to listen to Death Cab for Cutie's latest album "Codes and Keys" in its entirety. I bought that album a while back, during a very different time in my life, and have connected with the album a very distinct and vivid set of memories. As the music and then lyrics of the first song (quoted above) came through my headphones, I let the rhythm drive the words into me, and began to think about the concept of "home". What does "home" mean? Really. What does it mean? People have been writing about it, speaking about it, singing about it for centuries, so what has anyone actually learned? A few contemporary music examples that immediately come to my mind follow here:

Another summer day
Has come and gone away
In Paris and Rome,
But I wanna go home
Mmm I've got to go home.
-Michael Buble "Home"

Well I'm going home,
To the place where I belong,
Where your love has always been enough for me...
These places and these faces are getting old,
So I'm going home.
-Daughtry "Home"


Peel the scars from off my back.
I don't need them anymore.
You can throw them out or keep them in your Mason jars.
I've come home.
-Radical Face "Welcome Home"

Of course I cannot forget what is, perhaps, the most personally poignant of all of the songs dealing with the concept of home. It has particularly been on my mind as of late for various reasons:

And I have torn my soul apart from
pulling artlessly with fool commands.
Some nights
I just never go to sleep at all,
And I stand,
Shaking in the doorway like a sentinel,
All alone,
Bracing like the bow upon a ship,
And fully abandoning
Any thought of anywhere
But home,
My home.
Sometimes I can almost feel the power.
And I do love you.
Is it only timing,
That has made it such a dark hour,
Only ever chiming out,
"Cuckoo, cuckoo"?
-Joanna Newsom "In California"

For Buble and Daughtry, home is the place that surpasses everything else that once seemed more interesting. It is the place we never ultimately tire of, and where we find the love we need. To Radical Face it is a place where we take off our baggage (in probably a literal, but mostly a psychological sense) and abandon the harmful things we picked up on our travels. "Scars" that we thought, perhaps contentedly, were permanent parts of us. Death Cab paints home as both powerful and dangerous, comparing it to a fire that pulls us in. Ben's song is uncharacteristically (I should specify that I mean uncharacteristically for this album) somewhat pessimistic. I say that it is pessimistic because it suggests that home cannot last. It pulls on us, and then it falls apart, or threatens to fall apart "[the bricks] are only so strong, love." For Joanna (and this whole song should really be included here to get a definitive idea of her full and complex feelings on her home, California) home is like a gravitational energy that we cannot escape. Her home is both wonderful and awful in that it holds and comforts her, but takes her away from the other things she loves--things that are incompatible with home (e.g. in this song as well as others on the album, the narrator shows a great deal of reluctance to bring any non-native love into the sanctuary). Thus she feels she cannot leave her home, but "Must stay [there] in an endless eventide." Paradoxically, she suggests that once we have been outside, we are forever changed, even in trying to return. Her narrator states that "I am no longer afraid of anything, save the life that, here, awaits." We go out, we see the world, we overcome all fears, and then the only thing that scares us is returning to where we were before this happened. We only fear the life we knew and loved so purely in childhood, and the near-emptiness of those memories when we return.

I have learned from my own experience, as well as the experience of artists, that home is infinitely more complicated than we wish it were. Kitschy phrases like "home is where the heart is" have so little meaning for me now, in this odd stage of my life.

Ingrid Michaelson seems to agree with me on that point:

They say that home is where the heart is. I guess I haven't found my home. We keep driving round in circles, afraid to call this place our own. Are we there yet?
-Ingrid Michaelson "Are We There Yet?"

How am I to use my heart as a compass when I am not even sure where my heart is? I guess I am learning the hard way that you're never really lost until you've lost your compass. Is that irreparable? I'd like to think that it can be redeemed. I'd like to think it could be fixed, but I do not know where to begin. I will illustrate with a story.

Last Sunday I attended a church meeting to support a friend of mine who recently completed an LDS mission in Latin America. Her house happens to be close to the house where I lived when I started high school. When my family left that place, we put in a lot of renovation work, so I take a certain pride in the off-beat beauty of it. I would describe it as a quirky house; blue with an interesting slanted roof, but there is a small wrap-around porch and a lovely three-paneled white door. I drove by the old house on my way out of town; drove around it several times as a matter of fact, circling the neighborhood, listening to "In California". Those brief minutes were filled to overflowing with thoughts, feelings and emotions. I pondered the very musings that are finding public voice here, as well as a more concrete realization: how can you say a house is just a house? I don't think it is. That wood is in my blood. I worked for that place, so many long hours, and I cried and cried at the thought of beautifying it just to sell it and leave it. It isn't 'just a house', for as I drove by, I saw a little piece of myself in it.

The problem is, that is not a piece I can retrieve. It does not belong to me any more than any part of that house does. The family that lives there now seemed, judging by the outside decor, enthusiastic about the ensuing holiday. They were probably inside, listening to music, surfing the web, making lunch. They were blissfully unaware of my small agony as I circled, as I thought, as I wished.

And so it is with many houses, and people, and situations, and dreams, we leave them and they take little pieces of our hearts with them, and we hope that in our generosity we do not deplete the essence of who we are.

I retract. It is not born of generosity, but of necessity. The necessity to be a part of that which is around us. The necessity to give of what we are to what we are not, in the hopes that what we are not will become more like we are and what we are will become more like what we are not.

You say you're not interested in that sort of an exchange? To that I would reply that we can try to keep things from changing us, but we will find that in doing so, we are a great deal more than simply selfish, we are delusional. We come to this world to change, and to be changed. There is no place for holding tight to everything that we feel we "are".

I am changing. Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes (like now) I feel that I have given away too many bits of myself, and that in my inability to reclaim those pieces, I am somehow rendered un-whole. I am still waiting on redemption. I am still waiting on a reciprocation that will make up for all of the missing pieces. Perhaps home is where the very most of you is collected. Perhaps home is your head, where all of the memories are stored. I do not merely want to look at home as a concept, more than a place. I have to. I have to see home non-conventionally in my present circumstances. Home as a state of being. Home as a little box of all of my most treasured memories. Home as a place of personal and powerful worship.

I want to experience a new level of worship, of love. A love that allows me to pour my heart out and find it filling to the brim in return. I want to change in the holiest of all avenues of change: the give and take, the ebb and flow, the exchange, the barter between a human being and that someone/something they love, that someone/something they dedicate to, in every moment, waking, sleeping, breathing, fighting, living, dying...

And when I come up for air, and glance around, I want to find that the object of that love is Home; and know that I have found it at last.