FEATHERING MY NEST
A very strange idea just occured to me. When I look around my apartment, the way that I have feathered my nest, the things that I have collected and placed all around me, are things from all over the world. They are things that remind me of places I have been and adventures that I have had and people that I have met. I don’t cover my walls with textiles and photographs and paintings and objects in order to find a place in House Beautiful. I put them there because they make me feel good. Someone else might call them clutter or say that they are such a wild mix that they make no sense at all placed beside each other. But I don’t care. I put them there because when I look at them they make me feel good. And to increase the number of images that touch me I have four digital screens that display a constantly changing set of photographs and paintings so that I can include many more things that touch me on my walls. And how do I choose these things? I choose them the same way that I used to find and buy things at the flea market, if something touches me, strikes a chord with intensity, I want to put it on a wall or a table or the floor and stay in its presence.
The paintings are from museums all over the world and I like the digital versions even more than the original paintings, which of course I could never afford, because if an actual painting sits on my wall I become used to it and over time may pass over it while paintings that keep changing feel fresh and new. I have put many photographs that I have taken on my walls, 24 on each of my wooden barndoor entrances to rooms, not because I am showing off photographs, but because the people in those photographs touched me when I took them and touch me more and more the more often I look at them. They are just ordinary people in different parts of the world who now are ten or twenty years older than when I took the photo and they certainly don’t remember me. But every time I see their face, they touch me again in a way that enlivens me. Other people seeing the photographs have no memories of the place or the time and may not be touched, but I am touched again and again.
But the odd thing is that all of these things are from cultures different from my own. All of them are from cultures of immigrants to the United States that are now being deported if they are not citizens. All are from cultures which have made me feel very alive, mostly cultures that I have visited in the last five years during which time the threat to many Americans of immigrants have grown and grown. Their cultures all have enlivened me and if people would invite people from these cultures into their homes and hear their stories and eat their food and open themselves to what these people find beautiful and take part in their festivals and even visit their countries they could also be enlivened rather than threatened.
It is seems very odd that so many people feel that the way things are done in their little corner of the world is the only right or enlivening way and that other people are a threat. This leaves out and closes off the rest of the world and makes their lives narrower.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 