ON THE CONCEPT OF HOME

i have been thinking of home these days. when i find pieces of things that feel like home, i think of it. home is such a transferable concept. it seems to be something mostly kept close to the self, lodged somewhere inside the psyche, known better than one's own self and loved more than one's own kin. my home exists somewhere between here and nevada city, although not in any actual town or field between the two. it exists more in a place between the two, written on a scale of importance. it exists in the connections i form between the life of my past and the life in which i now live; the life of my future, too. it's not a melancholy feeling, because it's not something i necessarily want to pin down. more so, it is a feeling of excitement. i hold onto things of the past like relics that i observe but do not touch. their place in the layout of my life shifts with each new experience. something once deemed of utmost importance takes a seat behind something new, and then that something new ultimately takes its seat behind the old if it proves to be less significant. the present always takes the front seat, by default, like a cocky child, because the present is unlimited and therefore, in the imagination, it is infinite and it is infinitely greater than anything prior to it. i hold onto the future like a thing that is almost tangible, yet in a way that i cannot yet observe. it seems that the self is so eager to ascribe this feeling of "heimweh" (home-like) to everything it encounters, that home becomes a colorful jumble in which there exists some carefully orchestrated yet fluid balance between the ever-present and the ever-elusive. the elusive is viewed as something familiar: something totally definable and totally discernible. this is because of the very fact that it is elusive. its elusiveness renders it infinitely powerful and important.

point being, i've not been sleeping much lately because my mind has been trying to process what it has known, and subsequently trying to counter this with what it realizes it cannot know, and lastly with what it may one day come to know. i'm okay with it.

(January 2007)