Finding your home
I’ve written about this before – this sense of home – this strong tidal pull that brought me back to New Orleans to find my home. I think about my lover back home in Croatia right now and wonder does she feel home there? Or does she feel home here? How there is this constant substitution going on to find what feels like home – Spain? Croatia? New Orleans? It’s a puzzle because I have been away from home and know what it feels to yearn to be back. There is a saying that you should keep your heart where your feet are and I did keep my heart in California locked up in my marriage, but by and by and bit by bit my heart begged me to come home to New Orleans to be near my mother, to be in my culture, to be with my people. I felt that longing again when we evacuated – a fish out of water in Texas, until I crossed back over the Louisiana State Line, I was itchy.
I was speaking to someone last night who is struggling with this notion of home – he is in South Florida with his partner, but his parents are ailing and he feels a pull to go to his childhood home, to North Carolina to take care of them. Even though he has many siblings there, with grandchildren, all to tend to his parents, he feels the need to be there himself and they are trying to figure out how to do this as his partner cannot leave Florida where his work and life are – what to do?
There is this great passage from Wynton Marsalis in this book I’m reading, Where We Know New Orleans Is Home, written four years after the great leveee failure of 2005, after the great crash of 2008:
If you think your culture is a leisure activity, it belies a deep and profound ignorance. That’s why you will have trouble with your business practices, like we have trouble with our business practices in the United States, because we lack integrity. What informs your integrity is your culture, and your culture is your stories, your songs. That is your integrity, and when that is for sale and when everything is for sale, you lose your mooring. Where is home? You don’t know where home is, and once you don’t know where home is, you could be anywhere.