We are the response to a thousand stimuli and yet we provide the stimuli for a thousand responses. 

 

Home is a place where we are taught life. We learn what is acceptable and what is not. We learn how to love, the basic ideas of right and wrong, how to celebrate, and how to deal with loss.  We learn fear; organically grown fears highlighted by reluctance, avoidance, and skepticism. We learn what to fear. We learn the different ways to fear it. We learn how to hide from fear.

 

We learn how to hide from fear.

 

We. Learn. How. To. Hide.  

 

We hide so well, that eventually, we cannot even find ourselves.

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I had to find my own answers.  I never thought that at 35, my dog would be the one to teach me how to apply a baby diaper.  By this time, I surely thought that I’d have a family of my own. New knowledge comes with the unveiling of each day.

 

Throughout my life, I have only been in the presence of both of my parents in the same room a handful of times.  Their lives spun in completely different orbits, sharing moons yet not a single path of travel. Their separate trajectories left more than an absence of knowledge. It left a perfectly carved vacant cavity lush with fear and hesitation.  On this journey through Home, I search for answers to the questions never asked.  I've learned that answers are not always evident, but wait to be unlocked through familiar surroundings of daily life: people, places, moments of loss and triumph, confusion and symbols from a once simpler existence.

 

Home is an exploration of what is “right now” and how to get to “what is next” without a tutor, without the schema from the first school, home.