Tuesday, April 6, 2021

Homeless

 

It is a strange sensation to be homeless.

In ' The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest' Bob Dylan differentiates between a house and home..

I look back on 69 years, as my 70th birthday looms in two months, and come to the realisation that I never have had one domicile that I could call home. I guess that the closest that I ever came to calling somewhere home was in Colchester,  England, for thirteen years. Before, and since, I had, and have, only put down tentative roots. Pulled up after a few years.

I had thought that was changing, and that I was to, finally, put down roots in Jalan Denai, Puchong, Malaysia, but the recent Covid pandemic, and my partner abandoning me while I am in Cambodia put paid to that. I lost her, my job and my accommodation in one fell swoop. I remain homeless once more.

We are informed that home is where the heart is. Recent relationship upsets make me reflect on how tenuous our lives and loves are, and how that effects our relationship to the idea of house and home.

Ram Dass, the American mystic and teacher, encouraged us to consider to 'Be Here Now'. That is to live authentically in the present. In these present Covid days many of us are living tentatively, displaced, uncertain of the future and it is, indeed, a good time to leave the past behind, let the future unroll as it will and live each day as it unravels.

Not to project into the future, not to imagine some settled time when all our labours bear fruit, is difficult. Hope, we are told, keeps us going, but when hope turns into dreams then disappointment waits in the wings.

Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young encouraged us to 'Love the one you're with', and not to hold onto the past and its catalogue of regrets, but like Horace (Odes) to 'Carpe Diem', and to seize the day, or to be here now.

So, as I draw nearer to becoming a septuagenarian, and continue Jung's process of individuation with confession, elucidation, education and transformation, I shed many belongings. Some are taken from me, and some I give away gladly realising that happiness is only transatorily found in things, as happiness is a state of mind.

Will I, like Bob Dylan's Judas Priest, ever find a home or forever be Frankie Lee seeing houses? Maybe that too is a state of mind.


No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.