Home

A Man and his house. Defined and refined by each other, our homes are our selves, ever evolving. Growing within a space is a given, like seeing yourself in a mirror each day, a familiar comfort - trite but true.. I have this book of great writers' houses, a photo essay with some history to it - a glimpse into private life of some very public people. What I found striking is that the most charismatic, lived-in, inviting spaces were inhabited by loners.. True to them and natural as growing gardens go -- unkept and gloriously aging.  Decadent, elegant, or humble and ascetic -- they projected substance and a taste for life that only comes to those aware-- painfully or effortlessly aware of themselves, capable of embracing the beauty and the chaos perpetually set in motion by our touch. Unabridged, unexpurgated, much like the novels written within these walls, such homes are alive, their splendid still interiors only enhanced by decay. They now house time itself and have gone on living forever, sustained by memories and reflections..If not reborn with new generations, great homes slip into afterlife as grand crypts, mystifying and haunting.  Like a life shared, a house shared will either blossom or wilt filled with realities of its inhabitants and an order they create confronted by this enclosure..two, three, many worlds confined within same walls. I have seen brand new homes that were dead, stillborn, devoid of personal touch. Homes lost in clutter and destruction, war zones.. I've seen homes that felt like temples, filled with light and love and peace. I just saw a dying home, gone cold, its vast grand foyer bare, solemn..a festive garland wrapped around staircase like a curdled scream..emptiness of grandeur, now useless.. Life, once spilling over, now clinging to the basement shelves -- years, layers of life..boxed, bound, gagged. A house stripped of identity is doomed, so is a homeless man. Hemingway's home in Key West feels nothing like Hemingway, more like his then wife..except maybe the cats now roaming free.. He wrote in bars..I lived in tiny rooms that were my safe heavens and in great big ones that had no air to breathe. I was reduced to an imaginary space within a hostile house, there was no room for me but this very blog. I ran from there for three years and left in one day, never to return, but I still feel that crippling anxiety at times. How rare it is to find someone who fits right in, to see your life expand without the walls breaking..To suddenly be confronted with reality of another human being and recognize, embrace it as familiar, loved, lost and found. To what I owe this change of luck I do not know, I am forever grateful for each day, for love, when least expected, for vision of a home, our home.