The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon

Musings on Being and Becoming Human

Issue 7: Winter into Spring 2007

At Home

Our theme for this issue of The Grapevine is home, a setting for experiences held in common by all cultures. The word is replete with connotations of comfort, security, warmth, safety, shelter, softness, sanctuary, on the one hand and on the other, unease, friction, disturbance, abuse. Home is where the heart is, and you can't go home again. Home is the beginning, imaged as the womb, of a journey whose end is shaped as a tomb. Leaving home and homecoming are two of life's most poignant experiences.

Where are you "at home"? With whom are you "at home"? Does "at home" mean a person with whom you are so at ease that you can be fully yourself, or does it mean a door that you are afraid to open because you are not sure which of the several faces your mother or father or spouse or partner or child may present when you step into the room?

Home can be envisioned as a sequence of belongings to house, village, state, region, nation, hemisphere, world. When astronauts gave us our first impressions of what it was like to leave the planet, we learned that it is possible to be homesick for the earth. By contrast, humans on a spiritual journey often claim to be "not at home in this world" and profess instead nostalgia for a transcendent return to an eden, a paradise, or, in the meditation traditions of the East, a nirvana where we may never have been but which nonetheless contains the elements associated with the ideal home: rest, stability, peace, joy, bliss. Joseph Campbell's injunction to "follow your bliss" may be seen as an encouragement to find your way home, to the one you are yearning toward: somewhere, to become fully engaged in whatever claims all that you are and all that you can become.

In this salon we are turning the crystalline archetype of home to see and tell about its facets.

AT HOME here are writers speaking in a style more conversational than studied for an audience who might be seated on a front porch at night watching fireflies create random small rays to light up the listening, or in the dining room of an ancient inn with lamps and perhaps a hearth fire to kindle community.

It takes only one or two steps of the imagination to move through the dusk to the dining room at the inn or the porch of a house or, by daylight, to a backyard garden for picking grapes and for gossiping, a verbal mode associated with the term grapevine. We say I heard it on the grapevine, referring to rumor, advance news of interest to the community, sometimes scandal, always a dramatic story or piece of a story, circulating, making the rounds, lingering on the surface even when it suggests hidden things.

The SALON presents a variety of storytellers and image makers and thinkers, from promising beginners to seasoned artists of mature and full-bodied talents.

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