Homeward bound

                                                                  Kaladj

The dimming of the light makes the picture clearer

It's just an old photograph

There's nothing to hide

When the world was just beginning

I memorized a face so it's not forgotten

I hear the wind whistlin'

Come back anytime

And we'll mix our lives together

Heaven knows- what keeps mankind alive

Every hand- goes searching for its partner

In crime- under chairs and behind tables

Connecting- to places we have known

I'm looking for a

Home- where the wheels are turning

Home- why I keep returning

Home- where my world is breaking in two

Home- with the neighbors fighting

Home- always so exciting

Home- were my parents telling the truth?

Home- such a funny feeling

Home- no-one ever speaking

Home- with our bodies touching

Home- and the cam'ras watching

Home- will infect what ever you do

We're Home- comes to life from outa the blue

Tiny little boats on a beach at sunset

I took a drink from a jar

and into my head

Familiar smells and flavors

Vehicles are stuck on the plains of heaven

I see their wheels spinning round

and everywhere

I can hear those people saying

That the eye- is the measure of the man

You can fly- from the stuff that still surrounds you

We're home- and the band keeps marchin' on

Connecting- to every living soul

Compassion- for things I'll never know

Album: Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

Chairly there

Photo: Vlisco

 Dutch Wax prints designed for the African diaspora use some of the most inventive patterns and are often on a larger scale than anything else designed for apparel. There's a sheer joy to these fabrics that Africans the world over have adopted as their own to the point of identifying with them despite their being designed in by Europeans for their market. Today several west African firms exist, yet the plus appreciated and 

imitated is Holland's Vlisco.  

These designs featuring chairs and buildings are right at home on this page.

For more about spectacular Dutch wax prints, please see my textile blog, St Tyl.

Ah!



Ah! Le merveilleux d'une maison n'est point qu'elle vous abrite ou vous réchauffe, ni qu'on possède les murs. Mais bien qu'elle ait lentement déposé en nous ces provisions de douceur. Qu'elle forme, dans le fond du coeur, ce massif obscur dont naissent, comme des eaux de source, les songes...

Ah! The wonderful thing about a house is not that it provides warmth and shelter, nor that we possess its walls. It is rather that it has slowly deposited in us stores of sweetness, shaping, deep in the heart, a mysterious bedrock from which dreams emerge, like water from a spring...

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Terre des Hommes

Turn of the 20th Century Interiors

That people could come into the world in a place they could not at first even name and had never known before; and that out of a nameless and unknown place they could grow and move around in it until its name they knew and called with love, and call it HOME, and put roots there and love others there; so that whenever they left this place they would sing homesick songs about it and write poems of yearning for it, like a lover...
William Goyen House of Breath

A house is such a strong symbol. Refuge and edifice, it expresses who we are and sometimes who we'd like to be. It is a witness to so many important events and silently echos other more everyday acts. Last week you saw the Maison Prisonnière, a villa that is uninhabited, locked up, but that will surely one day break free of its chains. Any house represents many possibilities and also contains many memories. That particular house strikes the imagination because it seems lonely under its cloak of vines in the midst of an otherwise well-kept neighborhood. The shutters are left to swing on their hinges and creak in the wind. A broken window pane lets the wind howl through and may provide the only breath of fresh air that gets inside. But this was a family house and maybe even a proud dream house once. These turn-of-the-century paintings by Félix Vallotton help to imagine what the inside might easily have been.