"Draw Me Your Home"

On the first Monday of school in Stellenbosch, our lecture let out for lunch and I walked quickly in the direction of a spot to lay in the sun and eat my sack lunch. The 6 hour lecture was part of an intense application-only course we had to submit essays and personal stories to, months in advance. The first three hours had covered “Complexity Theory” and my mind was racing in search of my familiar world of absolutes. 

“What is it that you’re running from?” the voice of lecturer said in my ear. I was startled in my patch of dead grass with a mouthful of oatmeal. I remember my eyes getting wide like I was being exposed. I wanted to be contrary and defensive and maintain the air of mystery that I had so meticulously cultivated - but I went instead for “What do you mean?” Perhaps he had seen me running earlier, perhaps it was a question he asked everyone as a screening procedure. He shouted a “see you in class!” over his shoulder and carried on his way while the analysis of the interrogation set in.

Upon sending an email probe to demand clarification, the response came:

“I’m not sure. It was mostly gut, not reason. But let’s see:

1. You’re highly alert which means you’re sensitized to very many things.

2. You’ve already sensed something in me, onto which you’ve projected something you fear.

3. You verbalize concerns about being alone in your head and confronting the difficult existential questions.

4. Existential questions are, fundamentally, questions about purpose, meaning and value (both positive and negative).

5. When we seek purpose and meaning, we often overcorrect by seeing things in either/or, rather than both/and.

When we do either/or we run towards the positive and away from the negative. We don’t hold the 2 sides (I prefer spectrum) in a healthy tension.

A way to approach being here might be to hold opposing parts of yourself (impulses, orientations, desires, whatever) in tension. Rather than oscillating.”

With a thought of “well it’s now or never” I accepted the challenge from the lecturer to dig deeper for the truth to my running. We developed “The Course of Life” as an extracurricular mission to change my attitude and acute fear of everything. Over the course of the 6 month practice, we developed a friendship that persisted in art, even after coming home. In a recent check-in, he challenged me to do a few new things: listen to music without words, and create pieces of art in the abstract - explore the undefined. I had just previously reported listening to 71 total hours of The Lumineers over the year of globetrotting, and probably exhausted his patience with my need to write a detailed narrative of every choice I could make.

“Draw me your home and listen to some techno music” was the prescription I was given after a longwinded monologue about feeling perpetually displaced. Taking the process very slowly, I began with a stippled blob, reflecting, refracting, and floating eventually into a prism of dark, light, color, and space.

Home is the white light of morning cutting through the blinds, home is the blackness of the granite mountains on the nights with no moon. Home is the blue that is the sky, the violet pleasure of a lavender bath, and the yellow dance of the golden hour that does not discriminate in distributing its glory. With the repetitive loops of simulated percussion and the predictable but perfectly satisfying drops of the Techno in my ears, the colors in my head came to meet the the texture of sound in my ears squiggle by squiggle; and the formless stippled blob, at least for me - became my own self, floating through the prism of the colors that hold me by a thread to the earth