Topistically Speaking

"Topistics (Dr. E. V Walter)-- a holistic way of grasping a place as the location of shapes, powers, feelings, and meanings..." Mostly feelings and meanings.

Putting that inherently Buddhist nature aside (attached to nothing, with no future, and no past), home is where the heart and memory resides. Where does your heart reside? It could be in the bedroom of your parents home, or in an old house that you toiled to make a home. It might be a deck you sanded and painted, a classroom, a shopping mall you hung at or a vineyard you vacationed in. It could be a storage unit, a girlfriends house, or the back seat of a car. For some, it's multiple locations, brought to the surface by events, or times, or reflections. It is a feeling that few speak for fear of vulnerability, loss or attachments revealed.

But does the place provide the meaning, or does the meaning become assigned by the mind to the place? Dr. Walter attributed those feelings to the "place" and what that place does to us. That seems more like a diagnosis than a sociological phenomenon. It seems to be more a definition and feeling that we assign in our mind to a place. 

Memoryistics (2009): As I shed more places in my life, the "powers, feelings, and meanings" become redefined and scattered once again. I won't let home be where the stuff is or was. Home is where the heart is, and that can topistically be a dream, a goal, a lifestyle and a belief system. For the mind is a place where the heart really is. And memories are dangerous "places" with power, meaning and feelings. Places, of themselves, are not filled with such power. Amazing we do that to ourselves.

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes but in having new eyes."  -Marcel Proust