Sunday Reflection: What Do We Carry Home?

A little hello from the studio… 🖌️

I've been staring at six lines all morning.

Which sounds considerably less interesting than it has actually been.

They are in my sketchbook.

Nothing elaborate.

No faces.No buildings.No colour, actually, which feels slightly irresponsible coming from me.

Just six lines.

Memory.

Colour.

Rhythm.

Stillness.

Welcome.

Connection.

I drew them at the end of everything.

And I don't think I understood what I was drawing until now.

Because I've spent most of this book looking at people.

That is what I do.

I notice the way someone sits when they're comfortable.

The way somebody's shoulders change when they realise they are welcome.

The difference between the smile you give because somebody has pointed a camera at you and the one that happens when you've forgotten anyone is watching.

I notice hands.

Faces.

Rooms.

The space between people.

I suppose I have always believed that if I looked long enough, eventually I would understand what I was seeing.

This book has made me considerably less confident about that.

And I think that's probably a good thing.

Six Lines   

Twenty years ago, there were six of us.

We were younger.

Louder in some ways.

Much more certain in others.

We travelled together. We argued. We planned. We changed plans. We got lost and pretended we hadn't. We discovered places and people and, occasionally, versions of ourselves we weren't expecting to meet.

Somewhere along the way, we began building something.

At the time, I think we believed we were building it together.

Now I'm not sure that's quite right.

I think we were carrying different pieces of it.

Tonya remembered.

I painted.

Zaire listened.

Priscilla knew when to be still.

Kai made room.

Elias kept seeing connections everywhere, whether the rest of us were ready for them or not.

And eventually those things stopped belonging only to us.

That's the part I hadn't understood.

A memory changes when someone else begins carrying it.

A room changes when somebody feels welcome enough to return.

A rhythm changes when another person hears it and answers.

A connection changes when people begin travelling it without needing the person who first drew the line.

Maybe that is what those six lines were trying to tell me.

They weren't portraits of six people.

They were six things we learned to give away.

The Village We Thought We Were Building    

There are moments from these chapters that I keep returning to.

Not necessarily the dramatic ones.

The small ones.

A photograph somebody kept.

A story somebody nearly forgot.

A room that remembered people long after they had left it.

Someone asking a question instead of assuming they already knew the answer.

Someone arriving somewhere unfamiliar and discovering they weren't entirely alone.

Someone making space at a table.

Someone pulling out a chair.

Someone saying:

Come with us.

Perhaps that's the sentence underneath this entire book.

Not follow us.

Not look what we built.

Not even look where we're going.

Just:

Come with us.

There is room.

When The Village Carries Home    

I've been thinking about the title quite a lot.

When the Village Carries Home.

At first, home sounds like something you return to.

You leave.

You travel.

You experience something extraordinary.

And eventually you come back.

Home waits where you left it.

Except that isn't really what happened.

Home moved.

It travelled between Leicester and Birmingham.

It turned up in Nairobi.

It found its way into Paris.

It travelled through music and photographs and conversations and food and memories and people who knew one another twenty years ago and people who had only just met.

Sometimes the six of us weren't even in the same country.

And still, the Village continued.

Other people made decisions.

Other people welcomed someone.

Other people arranged things.

Other people remembered.

Other people connected.

People found one another without one of the six of us standing in the middle introducing them.

Twenty years ago, I think I might have found that strange.

Now, I find it beautiful.

Because perhaps home isn't something we built for people to return to.

Perhaps it is something people learn to carry.

And once enough people are carrying it, none of us gets to decide exactly where it will appear next.

The Part I Couldn't Paint  

There is something rather irritating about being an artist.

People assume you enjoy finishing things.

I don't.

Finishing something means deciding that this is where it ends.

This line belongs here.

That colour is enough.

Nothing else needs adding.

And I have never been particularly good at believing that.

This week I sat with an unfinished sketch in front of me while a conversation at another table became more interesting than the page.

So I stopped.

I watched.

Eventually somebody sent me a photograph of that exact moment.

There I was, apparently trying to capture a Village that was already happening perfectly well without my assistance.

There is probably a lesson in there.

I would prefer Elias not hear about it. 😂

But looking at that photograph now, I understand why I couldn't finish the picture.

The Village isn't finished.

How could I paint the final version of something that is still becoming?

And Then There Was Someone Else   

This may be the part I've been thinking about most.

Because the book began with six people.

But it doesn't end with six.

Look carefully at what happened.

People entered the story.

Some stayed for a moment.

Some changed something.

Some carried something forward.

Some became part of the Village without ever knowing what the original six imagined twenty years ago.

And somewhere along the way, that started happening outside the book too.

People began reading.

Recognising themselves.

Recognising somebody they know.

Wondering where they would sit.

What they would say.

Which Village they would belong to.

And suddenly my six lines didn't feel quite right anymore.

Not wrong.

Just incomplete.

Because that's what twenty years has done to the six of us.

The Village didn't simply grow around us.

People came in and brought something with them.

Their families.Their friendships.Their histories.Their ways of seeing things.Their ways of doing things.

Things none of us could have imagined when we first sat together twenty years ago.

Perhaps that's why the page still feels unfinished.

Six lines were enough to begin it.

They were never supposed to be enough to finish it.

Before We Go Anywhere Else    

Usually this is the part where someone tells you what happens tomorrow.

Where we're going.

Whose voice you'll hear next.

What the next chapter is called.

I know where we're going.

Elias has made rather certain of that. 😂

There is a place waiting for us.

There are stories beginning to stir there.

And yes, somewhere on the horizon, there is Salvador.

But I'm not going to rush there just yet.

Not because we're stopping.

We're not.

I simply think endings deserve a moment before we turn them into beginnings.

So before tomorrow comes, I'm going to sit with this one a little longer.

Four chapters.A great many people.More conversations than I could possibly paint.And six people who started all of this twenty years ago without knowing what it would eventually become.

Tomorrow can have tomorrow.

Today, I want to look at what we carried here.

Sunday Reflection 

So perhaps I don't have a grand conclusion for you.

I'm an artist.

I reserve the right to leave things unfinished. 😂

But I do know what I'm carrying from this book.

Home is not a building.

Community is not everybody agreeing.

Belonging is not being identical to the people beside you.

And a Village is not six founders standing at the centre of everything they created.

It's what happens when somebody takes what they were given and carries it a little farther.

A memory.

A colour.

A rhythm.

A moment of stillness.

A welcome.

A connection.

Until eventually nobody remembers exactly who started what.

They only know that when they arrived...

there was somewhere to sit.

Someone knew their name.

And there was room for them to become part of whatever happened next.

Maybe that's enough.

Actually...

I think that's quite a lot.

Until The Village Moves Again…   

Tomorrow, another story begins.

But before we go there, I want to leave you with one question:

If you were one of the lines in my sketchbook, what would your word be?

Not your job.

Not where you live.

Not where you've travelled.

The thing you carry into a room that changes it because you are there.

I think that's how Villages grow.

Not by finding more people who look exactly like the ones already inside.

By leaving enough blank space for somebody new to add something we didn't know was missing.

Six lines.

Twenty years.

One Village.

And still an unreasonable amount of blank paper.

Good.

I'd have been terribly disappointed if we'd finished it. 🎨

Keep creating beauty in the people around you.

— Maya 🎨🌿✨