Ever since leaving home-home, I have been on a vagabond’s journey to find a place to call my own. The movie Garden State approaches this “search for home” in a scene with Zach Braff (Andrew Largeman) and Natalie Portman (Sam):
Andrew Largeman: You know that point in your life when you realize the house you grew up in isn’t really your home anymore? All of a sudden even though you have some place where you put your shit, that idea of home is gone.
Sam: I still feel at home in my house.
Andrew Largeman: You’ll see one day when you move out it just sort of happens one day and it’s gone. You feel like you can never get it back. It’s like you feel homesick for a place that doesn’t even exist. Maybe it’s like this rite of passage, you know. You won’t ever have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it’s like a cycle or something. I don’t know, but I miss the idea of it, you know. Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people that miss the same imaginary place.
What I love about this scene is the struggle that is portrayed in Largeman’s words and expressions… He longs for a place to call home, a place that is comfortable and where he can be transparent. I think we long for a place to be transparent because it takes a lot of energy to hold up facades of ourselves. And this is the struggle… always yearning for home-home, wherever we find ourselves.
This past weekend I moved my life from Oklahoma City to the farmlands of Southern Iowa… specifically to the land of the Dutch – Pella, Iowa. I am up here pursuing the gal of my dreams, preparing for our February marriage and trying to figure out my life!! In this time of pursuit, preparation, and transition I am acutely aware of a difference… a difference related to the idea of home.
In transitions of the past, I always knew it would be a temporary, as each new city never left an imprint of stability. But this time there is permanency to my actions, a prevailing feeling that I will find my “home” this time around. I don’t think this means Pella, Iowa is to be home-home… rather it has more to do with consortion than location.
Consortion – the idea that permanency, stability, and collaboration are being fashioned in the hearts of Candace and I… in essence it is the emergence/convergence of our family, our life, and our future.
We are the middle of this re-definition.
I feel like a co-writer in a screenplay of my life rather than the sole-writer. As there is another voice to be heard, an additional opinion to heed. The endeavor is to make two dissonant voices mesh to produce a beautiful and boisterous harmony, and this is no easy task! Genuine joy and sorry, in the form of laughter and tears can only be produced in an atmosphere of transparency, a place where we are comfortable in our weakness and mutually dependent on the others strength. A safe place, a refuge from the outside, and a place to call home – her home, my home, our home-home.
