The basic comfort of sitting with a cup of coffee (or tea) remains through the ages and a quick way to feel at home anywhere.
My grandmother had crocheted doilies on the back and arms of her favorite rocking chair. The one on the back included the words Take a Seat My Deer next to a couple fawns. I took note of that as a child and never forgot the pun and the inviting sentiment. Something about that made me feel at home.
Cozy quaint home decor goes in and out of fashion—words of warmth framed up for the wall. Some are beyond the cringe. Live. Laugh. Love.
This one is a classic…
It was 1993 when I created an art installation for a group show at Boulder Art Gallery. The work began with a visit to a vintage curio shop where I found a tin toy plane and a pretty oval mirror that became central elements—along with plywood bases, words cut from a magazine, acrylic paint, red lipstick on the mirror and a string of colored lights. That mirror later turned up in my memoir.
The world felt safe and manageable. The skills and resources available to me seemed to be enough to thrive.
At Home in the World.
A couple decades later, I found those same words as the title of a book by Joyce Maynard. The story of her career as a writer is fascinating. I even wrote about it for the Buffalo free press publication, Artvoice. I remembered her earlier bold writing when at age eighteen she wrote a feature cover story for the New York Times Magazine back when I was a college student in 1973.
I enjoy the equanimity of being able to share my essays on this writing platform where many (like me) with fewer than a hundred subscribers publish alongside others with thousands, such as Joyce Maynard and her recent Stack called @Home in the World. Clever use of the @ sign! Like her other accounts on Instagram and Facebook, this one will be an abundant output of interest.
A few years ago, I visited Casa Paloma, the author’s home in Guatemala, to work on my memoir. It was a memorable 70th birthday gift to myself.
It’s not so easy to feel at home in the world these days, with a constant sense of the rug being pulled out from under and general lack of safety.
Marianne Williamson wrote in a recent Instagram post…
There’s a place in all of us where worldly drama cannot intrude. It’s the spiritual truth of who we are, our psychological clarity and our emotional fortress. It’s our refuge and otherworldly strength. The world is in the state it’s in today because we have exiled ourselves from its garden. Whether kissing a baby or walking through a park, reading a good book or cooking a good meal, looking into the eyes of a loved one or saying a simple prayer, we need desperately to hasten back to things that matter most. There we fortify our nervous systems at a time when the world would shred them. We need that fortification to endure and ultimately transform these times. An entire world is falling apart, and we need to create something much, much better. Life is calling us to a great rebirth.
Part of my diet for holding onto a feeling of “at home in the world” is watching inspiring films.
I watched the new documentary film One to One. It felt quite nostalgic to look back on the months after John Lennon and Yoko Ono arrived in New York (immigrants) and took an apartment in Greenwich Village to hang out with artists and political activists during 1972, a time of an awakening counterculture when they offered a free concert in Madison Square Garden for a jubilant crowd. The Vietnam war was still on. Nixon was President. Art and ideas were flowing. Along with the soundtrack created by Sean Ono Lennon, the viewer gets a real sense of being there with them during that creative moment. It stirs a longing for genuine hope and possibility that can be hard to find in these turbulent days.
To all that interferes with finding and sustaining a sense of home…
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Inspiring in a nostalgic kind of way.