Coming Home

This week opens my art exhibit of the same title at the Huntsville Museum of Art. The Coming Home exhibit features myself, LeXander Bryant, and Toyin Ojih Odutola. Although I’ve exhibited nationally and internationally for years, this is my first featured art exhibit in my hometown art museum. In reflection of the title and essence of the show, and with Stephanie Mills singing in my head I share this with you…

Some years ago, while I was serving as art ambassador in Colombia, South America, I was on the phone talking to my son who was a senior in high school at the time. It had been several weeks since I had been gone. Perhaps longer than I’d ever been away from them in a single stretch at the time. He asked me the question, “Dad, do you miss home. My immediate answer was yes. But interestingly enough, I felt at home. On a daily basis and consistently so, I was painting, presenting, writing, lecturing, advising, and at times even counseling. The spaces in which I moved embraced me with such fervor and gratitude that it felt like family as well. after the call, the idea of home kept circling in my head. Then it came to me that there were two concepts of home, perhaps more but two revealed themselves to me immediately. The first home is rooted in attachment: family, memory, ritual, familiarity, the chair that knows the shape of my body, the voices that recognize me before I speak. It is the geography of belonging. This home restores.  Here I don’t have to perform.  The other home is vocation/calling. It’s the environment where gifts rise to full altitude. Like an eagle at home on the wing. In Colombia, I wasn’t just occupying space, I was operating in my element, doing what I do.  That kind of home is not built with walls or ceilings, but with purpose.

So, in essence home is not necessarily a location but rather a condition of being. One a dwelling place. One a becoming space. One shelters me. The other animates me. There has to be a balance between the two, like reaching home base. And home base isn’t one place but a rhythm between the two. But as I sit here and unpack this, I’m peeling back another layer. That layer is recognition. In Colombia, I felt embraced with such fervor and gratitude that it felt like family too. That reveals that home can emerge wherever the soul is properly witnessed. We don’t merely need shelter. We crave resonance. If we are honest with ourselves, we admit that in our heart of hearts we ache to be seen accurately. Sometimes strangers perceive our essence more clearly than those closest to us, not because they love us more, but because they encounter us in the fullness of our expression. Perhaps this is the balance if I can limit it to that…  I will ascend into the air of my calling, and I will return to the ground of my relationships.  I will not abandon one altar to worship at the other. An eagle has two homes, the nest and the sky.  

When I think of home, I can’t help but start singing the words of the Stephanie Mills song from The Wiz…

When I think of home, I think of a place where there’s love overflowing

I wish I was home, I wish I was back there with things I’ve been knowing

Love doesn’t always look like kisses and hugs, sometimes it’s hard knock s and hard decisions. When I truly think of home, it goes beyond the place, maybe even beyond the people present now and into that space where memory serves as agency to the things I’ve been knowing.  What I mean by that is I’ve always felt a connection in my chest beyond all the history that was presented in the space we call home, in my parent’s house, in this city, this state of Alabama, this yet to be United States of America. It’s so real, it colors practically every move I make. All I can tell you about is that it’s a beloved community with the superficial things that divide seen as parts that bring a plethora of texture, flavor, and fragrance to a great big gathering where we know that we are all a part of each other… all family.