End Trip

Hearing about home was often like listening to present day psalmists praising home's emotional existence and reveling in its descriptors: peace, tranquillity, community, family.

There was, of course, the interruption of the community psalmists' voices. The school shooting in Paducah, Kentucky tore home apart, but it also provided an opportunity for a community to reassemble and re-create what had been lost in the shots fired.

This is my end trip, my time to try and bring 30,000 miles to paper. When I think of Southern Journeys, I imagine four nesting rings. The center ring represents the home concept as a whole. The ring outside home stands for Saturday and Sunday. These points symbolize those special places we infuse with feelings of "at home," like the Jamison Building, American Beach, and Sunday worship in song.

The next ring is the ring of home breaking, those times when our sense of home is thrown into doubt and pain, as was the case with the Heath High School shooting.

The final ring, unlike the preceding three, is broken and can rotate around the nest. This is the ring of home making. This mobile ring holds the vocabulary of home, those terms and phrases that enable us to express our emotion about home in culturally appropriate ways. It revolves to encompass the days of the week. Its terms are called into doubt when the core of home is torn, and they are summoned forth when it is time to cast out doubt.

Home is as much nostalgia as it is grounded in the present. Concepts of home have a romantic cast, yet they are concrete, true, and powerful. As part of our expressive culture, home, as described through a Southern Journey is a component of what I call our folklife of emotion.

Folklife consists of those skills, beliefs, and expressions that we learn from people in our families, communities, and work places. They are not learned in a classroom situation, nor from videos and other outside means, For example, family folklife might include holiday celebrations, recipes, stories, or sayings. A community's folklife could also consist of celebrations, forms of worship, and manifestations of community pride.

How we talk about and feel home is a part of our folklife, our response to the world within and around us, using expressions that have withstood the tests of time. Given that our talk about home is about how we feel, I think of home as a part of a broader folklife of emotion, that which is vital and invigorating in our lives.

The folklife of emotion as it relates to home has other components. Witold Rybcznski outlines these in his wise book, Home: A Short History of an Idea. Some of these elements are: intimacy, privacy, ease, efficiency, and austerity. Home describes an environmental rhetoric, while Southern Journeys is concerned with an emotional rhetoric of home that has its base in what we experience with our families, communities, and co-workers.

Home, in the folklife of emotion, is powerful, but not necessarily overwhelming. It is powerful in the sense that it holds tight the passion we have for an environment that is also a feeling. Home does not, however, have the power to completely overwhelm us, knock us down in bewilderment. The only exception to this are singular events such as the Heath High School shooting, a form of home breaking that can bring us to our knees.

Although Southern Journeys was an exploration of concepts of home in the South, what Southerners say about home can be applied most anywhere. This aspect of the folklife of emotion is universal. For those who experience home, they own the home concept. Perhaps this is one major part of our lives that we have some control over, no matter where we live. And we endow our ownership with "terms of endearment."

Not all thoughts and terms of home are sweet. For some, home is painful. Abuse, incest, poverty -- people experience home in these ways as well. And given society's taboos, these aspects of home are often sadly silent in the folklife of emotion.

What a tangle. Home is a complex universal that propels and owns us. One way I have tried to get through this tangle is to think about my own concept of home. How does it fit into the ring of home making?

Today, five elements help me fit into my skin and create a concept of home: safety, work, music, family, and friends. At first I didn't see these on the ring of home making because they didn't seem to be shared by most of the people I visited on the road. Family fits, and so does safety. These are shared with others. But the other elements didn't seem to fit until I saw the home making ring to be fluid, just as folklife is dynamic. This fluidity would allow my home elements to slide into place onto the ring and flow along with the others. This make sense/ As the folklife of emotion shifts and changes, then concepts of home shift and change to meet our culturally emotional needs.

And so it goes. In a world that is dynamic, this one component - home - is at once stable and vigorous. Most of us can count on having a multi-faceted concept of home that grows and changes along with us. It is an existential constant that is crafted from experience and faith that we all to often take for granted.