“I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.”

How many of you are far from “home”? Home is where you hang your hat. I agree and I love to roam….to wander. The hardest part is balancing the values of empathy,compassion and understanding with all types of people from different walks of life and remembering…”coming from where you’re from.” It did mold you into who you are. Comparison is a normal human activity. Its part of deciding what is safe and what is not, albeit very misconstrued at times. The five senses with smell being the strongest, really brings you back to where  nostalgia takes the wheel and decides your destination. Taste, also. This is not a review for Sonny’s Pizza (a review ain’t needed, GO there!) But the smells, the sounds, the tastes take me right back to my beloved. I let out a sigh of relief when Im outside Strasbourg-Saint Denis and know I am close. I close my eyes and compare it to what Jean-Paul Sartre felt walking into Cafe de Flore.

This is definitely a Enjoy the Little things in Life post once again but with this one, I would like to give a shout out to the places we feel best at home when home is far away. That place can be anywhere and I hope you, the reader, knows exactly what I am talking about. In a world getting more and more digital and hyper realistic, we are trading natural and tangible places for replica, holograms and artificial constructs of once were. Our physiological body of being is still there but our psychological aspect of being is getting more and more rerouted to a place where we can’t tell the difference of fake or real, good or bad for us, etc. Freedom and Free will is scary, certainty is safe. It is hard to deal with the change, thats for sure but we can’t ever forget where we came from and WHO WE ARE. I was just reading Philipe K. Dick’s 1972 speech, “The Android and The Human.” He is the author of the book that Inspired the movie Bladerunner. In a world where the only way to tell a human from an android(cyborg) is with an Empathy test, speaks volumes. Social Media is now showing you all emotional outcomes in a 1 minute scroll. Humans will be burnt out, more and more. The test of time will be how many of us can snap out of it and resist. Art, poetry, music,dance, Creativity….will be dead. Dont think, do. “You will own nothing and be happy.” Start from the top and make the bottom realize there is no out. If the TOP men of government/monarchies/etc can do what they want, why can’t I? “Do as I say, not as I do” Covid’s biological ways were real, thats a fact. (I hope I dont have to explain what a fact is) The outcome of Covid with society was “Ima do me”, “Ima protect my own”. It created this bubble of apathy. Community was still there BUT few and far in between. Covid left us to our own devices (literally) while sitting at home with nothing to do. That 5.5″ piece of glass we call our phone screen is our whole world now. Did you even paint if its not on Instagram? I just….I just wanna go home. Where the conversations are real and deep, the love is real and deep, the understanding is real and deep. The loyalty is real and deep. Where is home now, though? Can any of us really find our way?

Ill end it with the 1922 poem from A.E. Housman:

The Laws of God,The Laws of man

The laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;
And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.
Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws for them?
Please yourselves, say I, and they
Need only look the other way.
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest their neighbor to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With jail and gallows and hell-fire.
And how am I to face the odds
Of man’s bedevilment and God’s?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
They will be master, right or wrong;
Though both are foolish, both are strong.
And since, my soul, we cannot fly
To Saturn nor to Mercury,
Keep we must, if keep we can,
These foreign laws of God and man.