“Something has spoken to me in the night… Saying: [Death is] to lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth.

 

…Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox… that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement.  At any rate, that is how it seemed to young George Webber, who was never so assured of his purpose as when he was going somewhere on a train.  And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there.  It was only when he got there that his homelessness began.”

 

-Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again, 1940

 

 

Twenty five countries and five years far (March 2013 – September 2018).  These works explore where one comes from, where one’s been, and how to hold it all at the same time. They are about memory, place, belonging – and perhaps also, unbelonging.  I consider them a shared landscape – a history, impression, and humanhood that encompasses experience both inside and outside our unchosen inherited homes.  My intent is not to attach meaning or sentiment to memories, but rather to expose them as bewildering, shifting, incomplete brain proteins – yet still allow them to retain an observational loveliness.  Proof of fallibility is seen in this collection itself, as I forgot to include a country (dear American Samoa, my apologies)!