Authenticity

It strikes me that there has been a lot of talk of authenticity involved in the house, especially in fit and finish, the things with which we interact. Aside from the Jungian implications, which I fully embrace, it strikes me that some people want their house to be stately, to stand proud and reflect well. Some want clean horizontal lines and uncluttered pen spaces. Some strive for peace or tranquility, and others a sort of messy id-ness, wearing their insides out. Traditional, historical, craftsman, victorian, colonial, a house reflects the self- perception of its creator or owner, some notion and some period of time of how life should be lived, in public and in private.

We seek authenticity, a sense that in our home genuine things can happen. Genuine love, friendship, connection. Genuine contemplation, conversation, and even (though increasingly rarely with age, it seems), genuine sleep.

I was thinking about this because it strikes me, in thinking of you, the reader, how easy it must be for some to find this journal overwrought, sentimental, or striving too hard to be meaningful. Passing for a moment the irony that would present for a creative life dedicated to eradicating those very qualities from the human story experience, it might be difficult for some of you to connect with something so innocent and permeable as the search for authentic expression. 

We have so many filters in our lives, so many ways to take the real and recontextualize it in ways that diminish its significance, as if we're afraid to admit to ourselves that the breaths we take are precious to us and we care deeply about how, where, and under what conditions we expel them. To cite a banal example, I notice how fast Barak Obama's message of hope and rational government has been pushed away by a parody of saintliness, as if striving to be better (could our government be worse?) was too insignificant to admit that we cared about it, and this by those very thinking people who, I'd wager, for years have pined for just such a rational and intelligent approach to governance.

The political message is not the point here; the psychological process is.  Some might call this process cynicism, but I think that's too easy. We wrap ourselves in a general blanket of dismissiveness for protection against the authentic, to protect ourselves from a harsh life, a life that often feels like its getting away from us, moving too fast, getting too complicated, getting too regulated or just too multifaceted for us to make sense of.

But a home is the shelter from that life, the external container of our internal space. How we shape and form it should be emotionally naked and raw. Most people don't get this opportunity, however, the space and time to make it just so. They either do it bit by bit over time, an epic narrative, or live in various states of benign neglect, making do with what shelter and comfort we can find within the walls we inhabit.

I am increasingly aware that we have been given a great gift, albeit one born of adversity. We get to reconsider and reconceive our home almost from scratch. We didn't choose this path; it has been thrust upon us. But it may prove great nonetheless. In the seared and empty walls of the wooden box on Moreno Drive, we can pour the imagination of who we are and aspire to be. And we're trying to do that honestly, authentically, and with heart.

In that space, I think, there is no place to hide.

So pardon me if I can't muster ironic distance, clever retorts, mild quips, or even--most of the time--a wry smile toward this experience. I know it is vastly more entertaining to read that sort of narrative. Goofy characters, quirky irony, etc.  I can be funny (I think). But every time I try, I simply revert to a contemplative space closer to the bone. I don't want to push this away, or wrap myself in a warm blanket of protection. I want to breathe clean air, to get the smoke out of my lungs, to stay clear and present to the experience (perhaps that explains the scooter). 

This journal hopes to find a way to share with you that exposed feeling so that you can touch that parts of yourselves as well, to find in the space of our reconstruction a bit of your own inner authentic space. I want you to put this down and look around your room and think about how the home in which you live effects you moment to moment, plays in your senses like flavors play on your tongue, writes the narrative of your inner life. I want to find a language on these pages that you can embrace with the same emotional nakedness that we feel, turned out of our home into that speeding world,  trying to find both a way back in, and what "in" really is.