Today we looked at the ideas of home and exile. Which was amazing in the fact that at lunch, just before class started, I was talking to someone about my longing for home. Not missing San Diego, but the longing that I have been carrying with me much of my adult life, or maybe my whole life. What does "home" mean for me? We did an art process on exploring that for ourselves and then looked at the idea of "exile", what does that mean for us?
In the evening we went to a panel discussion on the topic. It was a fascinating thing to experience in myself that through (imagining) exile my connection to myself got greater, in a new and unexpected way. Then a colleague on the panel who is doing expressive arts with the ex boy soldiers in Sierra Leone shared stories of many whom are now amputees. Missing arms or legs and living in refugee camps. And how they know home in a deeper way than I have ever thought of. A young boy who had both his legs cut off by his captures said, “Home is dancing on my hands.”
Fabulously brilliant ideas were thrown around the room and got me thinking and asking more questions. Here are a few that struck me:
- We are exiles when we do not know the consequences of our actions.
- Reconciliation of the most basic level is when skin touches skin.
- Home is the absence of what was.
- The absence is where home lives.
- In the emptiness or absence we can feel our own humanity.
- Connecting in our emptiness…
- Every ground is a potential graveyard.
- Is exile a myth?
- Why are we so attached to the stories of exile?
- A nation that exiles others is impoverished itself.
- Does exile serve as a resource for human evolution?
- Every belonging creates an exclusion.
- What does it mean to belong?
- Can we long for a place or is it the memory we associate with the place that we long for?
The question that I then turned to for myself is: Is my longing for home a self induced exile? Am I more comfortable believing I am on the outside of my desire, that it is not being met? I know that doing the art on exile was much more satisfying than doing the art on home. And the home that I ultimately created in exile, had a depth that my original home piece did not have. Granted, this is all in the imaginal. And I could not know the exile that many in the world feel, yet I can imagine who I know myself to be and what I think I would do, and I have experienced small exiles in my life. So the next question becomes, can I create that level of intimacy with myself, that deep sense of home that I imagined in my art, without being exiled, or is exile a necessary step toward “home”. What I do know, and this is the GIFT of this work I love to do, expressive arts, is that I for the first time I felt some semblance of what “home’ meant for me in the deeper sense. So now I do not feel so alienated from it. I feel like I have enough of a sense of it that I can go back to and maybe even build from. Don’t know if that makes sense. I would love to hear your ideas on it, email me!
Just another Sunday evening in Saas Fee with a little philosophy thrown in…I am way too tired to write more at this moment. I will end on a Nietzsche quote from tonight…
“You must have chaos inside you to birth a dancing star.”
My camera is not working still, hopefully by tomorrow I can get it figured out and start posting some photos. Of course, today was cold and rainy, clouds covered the mountains so there was no hint of them. If it wasn’t for the strange architecture, we could have been in La Jolla on a June gloom day…
Lots of love! Tish
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