A SEARCH FOR TRUE HOME
The road to hope is paved with change.
This post was written as an exercise using a writing prompt suggestion (the poem listed below.) We were asked to use it as a jumping-off point in a stream of consciousness to relate our thoughts about finding and connecting with the place of our true home. It was the beginning of the poem that struck the deepest chord for me.
“Meanwhile I bend my heart toward lamentation. Where, as the times implore our true involvement. The blades of every crisis point the way.”
(Partial quote from the poem: A Dream of Trees by Mary Oliver)
A SEARCH FOR TRUE HOME
I have lived in a perpetual state of mourning since January 1981, the day my mother died.
Death has been a long-time visitor since I was a child. Ten years later, in December 1990, my dad died, but the cycle started earlier.
- Age 6–7, my favorite great aunt and my grandfather died. My first real deep experience of loss.
- Age 8–9, my horse Wanda died. I named her after a patron of my mother’s beauty shop, who I was crazy about as a kid. I was devastated.
- Age 10–11, my Siamese cat, Loud Mouth, died. We had raised her on a bottle from birth. She was a pocket cat, at least that is what we called her until she got too big to fit. She felt safest in the pocket, trying to crawl inside long after she had outgrown it.
- Age 11–12, Shirley Farmer, a great lady whom I loved dearly, died. She introduced me to bible school at the age of 3, picking me up and bringing me home. I played with her son every week when my mama did her hair. I was so upset, physically sick, I could not go to the funeral.
- Age 12, one of my best friends, 3 years older, died of Leukemia. My mother did her grandmother’s hair.
- Age 13, Fannie died. She taught me to crochet clothes for my dolls, and my mother did her hair.
- Age 14–15, my Uncle John died. He lived with us on a few occasions. I was pretty nuts about him.
- Age 15, my dog, Fritzy, who I had since age one and my dog Peanut died.
I had just turned seventeen when mama died, followed by my daddy ten years later. This does not account for all the deaths as there were others in between, people and pets.
The year after daddy died, my dog Trixie died. Daddy bought her for me the year after mama died because the Pekingese he had bought me was stolen six months earlier. That was even harder in some ways.
My mother’s good friend Helen Jones watched over me after my mother died. She became my best friend as she was to my mother. She died when I was in my early thirties. It was as hard as losing my mom and dad.
The years are littered with the losses, aunts, uncles, grandmother, half-sister, cousins, friends, and beloved pets, not mentioned.
It’s a sobering thought.
I sometimes think I don’t know how to live or feel without mourning being an intricate part of my being.
I sometimes think I don’t know how to live or feel without mourning being an intricate part of my being.
Death is life. Life is part of death. I don’t know how I feel about that overall. Sometimes I am humbled, sometimes devastated, other times grateful. And yes, there have been times of anger and rage.
True home. Where is it?
All the above equated as home to me. They no longer exist, even the structure of the house that was my childhood home no longer stands.
The real truth here is people shape your world. They influence how you feel about it and them.
People inspire your goals and desires; even the negative aspects of how you act and react are influenced by people.
We define our own choices based on what we know, learn, reason, and through the process of trial and error strategies.
We pass on our survival skills as best we can in action, words, reactions, and deeds.
Without people, there is no civilization and no place to call home in the manner of all humans.
We are the constructs of our imaginations and hearts.
Those constructs are evident when we look at our world. You can see it in our architecture, art, music, and clothing. We carry it around with us via cell phones, cars, computers, airplanes.
It is embedded in our ideology through our thought philosophy — worldly and personal. You see it in our policies, government, movies, the foundations and structures that make up our civilizations, on and on it goes…
We make choices and decisions based on the world we create around us. At one time, those things were wilder, chaotic, and without boundaries.
People harnessed the untamed power of creation, adding boundaries to shape the world as we know it.
We are born with the power of creation/creativity. Yet civilizations eventually fall and rise throughout time. One day, even our planet and universe will die — fade away in a big bang, or quiet fade, we don’t know, but it will cease to be someday.
Life is tough.
Where am I going with this?
The only constant in this life is change. The only inevitable death.
To embrace change is to embrace life, so why is it the hardest damn thing in the world to do? Why is it so painful?
Change is like a melody of emotion, yet it is resistance, and it is the use of that change, that shapes lives and worlds.
I can only experience any of that from my single point of view. It comes down to one. One decision, one action, one choice, and then another, one at a time.
People need people to build kingdoms and to destroy them.
There is only no hope if I stop looking for hope. Even death in the unknown brings change.
The point?
We can always change our minds. Change with all its uncertainty is the reason we all get second chances, why we can start over.
Change is the weaver. It is eternal in nature, making opportunity infinite.
An opportunity will present, but I must watch, wait, and recognize it.
So, life may very well exist in the lamentation of it, but so does the joy and wonder. The principal of change is absolute, which is why we can hope and have faith.
…life may very well exist in the lamentation of it…
My home will change many times in this life, but my true-home will be my investment in people, and my ability to create and hope.
I am one. I enter whole and exit into Infinity.
What is 1 divided by Infinity? Quora Answer.
“Meanwhile I bend my heart toward lamentation.”
RIP my friend — October 2, 2019. I miss you.
Encouragement for my writing: A Note: This is the first story I have put behind the Medium partnership wall. If you read there and clap Medium will pay me. Thanks for the support. Not all my post will be in the partnership. This is my first.