This project is spoken word over moving image. It started out with a poem I wrote for a writing club. I offered up the prompt for the group, and y’all couldn’t possibly guess it.
(The prompt was “What is home?”)
I wrote the poem based on experiences I had during therapy, and thinking about how the work I was doing there felt very connected to the important work of “homing” as described by Clarissa Pinkola Estes (PHD) in her book Women Who Run With the Wolves.
What is homing? It is the instinct to return. To go to the place we remember. It is the ability to find, whether in dark or in daylight, one’s home place. We all know how to return home. No matter how long it’s been, we find our way. We go through the night, over strange land, through tribes of strangers, without maps and asking of the odd personages we meet along the road, “What is the way?”
The exact answer to “Where is home?” is more complex… but in some way it is an internal place, somewhere in time rather than space, where a woman feels of one piece. Home is where a thought or feeling can be sustained instead of being interrupted or torn away from us because something else is demanding our time and attention. And through the ages women have found myriad ways to have this, make this for themselves, even when their duties and chores were endless.
I did this video in collaboration with my partner and favorite photographer, Ben Rukavina. I have much to say about process on this one, which I will detail in a future post.
This photo/dance/poem/video does feel like the very start of the home project for me- the question itself. Embracing not knowing clear answers, but expressing a desire to develop some.
What is Home 