What is home?
Home is a way of seeing.
I realized that one day when I was walking home from school (an indulgent 3-hour walk) and came across the Art Cart in Oakland. The Art Cart is some kind of volunteer project that sets up at various places around the city, supplying paper and pastels, crayons, paint, and other materials. They started by giving me a sheet of paper with some questions on it. "What is art?" The answer seemed simple enough to me. I'm a poet, and poetry is, in my opinion, first and foremost a way of seeing. (Perceiving might be a better word.) Not too far a stretch to apply that to art more generally.
The second question was, "What is home?" I'd been primed. Home was a way of seeing, too! The Art Cart volunteers admitted that most people did give the same, or very similar, answers to both questions.
Maybe we use art as a way of seeing our way home.
I drew a picture of the Big Dipper, because home for me is Detroit, and an old Underground Railway song, "Follow the Drinking Gourd," was meant to help people navigate their way north to Detroit, to cross over to Canada. It represented for me a sort of mental map that centers my heart on its home and helps me to see the world through that lens. My mental map is still centered on Detroit, even though I live in California. I also see the world as a Detroiter, no matter where I go.
If art helps us see our way home, maybe home pushes us out again into the world to see in order to create something new.
I realized that one day when I was walking home from school (an indulgent 3-hour walk) and came across the Art Cart in Oakland. The Art Cart is some kind of volunteer project that sets up at various places around the city, supplying paper and pastels, crayons, paint, and other materials. They started by giving me a sheet of paper with some questions on it. "What is art?" The answer seemed simple enough to me. I'm a poet, and poetry is, in my opinion, first and foremost a way of seeing. (Perceiving might be a better word.) Not too far a stretch to apply that to art more generally.
The second question was, "What is home?" I'd been primed. Home was a way of seeing, too! The Art Cart volunteers admitted that most people did give the same, or very similar, answers to both questions.
Maybe we use art as a way of seeing our way home.
I drew a picture of the Big Dipper, because home for me is Detroit, and an old Underground Railway song, "Follow the Drinking Gourd," was meant to help people navigate their way north to Detroit, to cross over to Canada. It represented for me a sort of mental map that centers my heart on its home and helps me to see the world through that lens. My mental map is still centered on Detroit, even though I live in California. I also see the world as a Detroiter, no matter where I go.
If art helps us see our way home, maybe home pushes us out again into the world to see in order to create something new.
