Home, revisited.

From a letter I received upon returning to Portland,

"Is home just an idea? Is it just a feeling? Is it an actual thing that can be tangibly felt? Or is it tangible at all? I once thought that I was satisfied just believing that home would only come when heaven did but that's not satisfying at all. Another time I convinced myself that home is where there are friends and food. But that leaves the impression that home can never be stable."

 They were perfect words to go to sleep to because they gave names and faces to many of my emotions having just left one home to return to another.

In reading Radical Hospitality, I am beginning to wonder if home is not much more easily defined as space. Space to breathe and be. Specifically addressed in the book are the areas of people, of ourselves, even of God that remain mysteries. Homan writes,

"There is a gentle hospitality with the self that most of us fail to practice. You know that moment you look in the mirror and see a stranger staring out those eyes? We don't accept the stranger within. We dread the regions of ourselves we don't understand. By learning to value the otherliness of the actual stranger, we honor the mystery within us, too. ...Not only is there a stranger in your skin, there are several in your home too. The essence of hospitality is receiving the stranger while letting them remain a stranger."

He continues on talking about the importance of making room for who people actually are instead of who we want them to be, elaborating on God in the stranger and our inability to ever understand God... how He is always a bit of a stranger. Already, however, I have copied enough words to keep me occupied the rest of my life. I could spend the rest of my life just trying to "receive the stranger while letting them remain a stranger"; and I am sure that it will take months if not years of trying before I begin getting it right often enough to see any progress in myself. While this is profoundly overwhelming, I digress in my pursuit of words to address home.

I do not think home in the truest sense is possible without great endeavors toward hospitality. Home is that space where you can be greeted for the similarities you have and the sense you do make, but your mysteries and tangles are welcome to come inside and rest too. A space where it is safe to grow because no one and nothing are trying to force it.

I will not fully understand myself at the end of my life and life is so much easier to handle if I am not expected to. If I am free to take in hand one mystery at a time and let them rest in a safe place, I may yet learn and grow. I can hardly do that if I must hide the irrational and non sequitur from view, much less the bent and broken.

Intermission Over.

chili oil. not related to pie.

Today is a very important day.

Today is the first day I have made a gluten free pie crust that actually did exactly what it was supposed to.

Today is the first day I follow all the directions on the recipe because I do not have to 'get creative' to make it work.

Today is not the first day I have made excellent crust.

strawberries for pie

all the flours for gluten free crust

It is however the first day which I find myself actually wanting to use a rolling pin. And that, that is worth celebrating.








I wrote the above words and took these photos *last* Saturday...and it was an important day. But I really do not know what I was building up to with them. I had an idea of giving reasons for why I don't have a food blog and I probably was thinking about how all of my creativity goes into food these days. This morning's invention in my not awake but not asleep state being chocolate chip pie crust. In the shower, I contemplated putting berries into banana bread. Raspberry banana bread. That's where it's at. With chocolate. Or Nutella. Or just with butter.

However, I am not the sort that should start a food blog on my own. I am easily distracted. To take photos AND write AND cook is asking too much. You will notice that I have no photo of my finished pie. I forgot. In the birthday-ing and the eating, I forgot. Some processes should not be interrupted for photos. Sometimes photography is the natural outcome of the way you live and watching the world around you. But sometimes, sometimes photography gets in the way of the living. You begin seeing so much, begin saving so much seeing for later...that you hardly have any at the time. I don't like that.

Anyway, I've lost myself again. I will be found in the pages of my newest endeavor: Radical Hospitality. It is a book which is both validating so much of what I have always wished I could express and challenging me to be a bigger and better person than I am right now. Why can't healthy things feel only exciting and wonderful? I have growing pains already which only mildly encroach upon the excitement.

It is a new time of life for sure. And soon, very soon, I will be heading home...except, everything is different. Therefore, there will likely be the requisite musing about home and place and people about ... two or three weeks from now. For now, I leave this virtual page with two quotes. One which has followed me from a poet I heard earlier today: "Becoming a person who does not do things just because I can."

I do not yet know its significance in my life and ponderings but for now, it has gentle muse-shaped claws which are hanging on until I have the space to think about it. I think it is related to becoming someone who is free, who thinks enough about what they do and who knows themself well enough with honesty that they are not subject everything and anything which makes a demand of them. Life is so much more than keeping other people happy.

And the second, from Ray Bradbury since he passed away this week and there are few people who I would  love to spend a day, or a lifetime, trying to see the world in the eyes and the shoes that he did. I love the way he looked at and described life.


“We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?” 
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Ok, and a third:

“If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.” 
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451