The Long Way Home
Chronicle #061626
There was a season of my life when I was looking for answers everywhere except the one place they could be found.
I had just bought my first house on my own. The walls were filled with the artwork I couldn't bear to leave behind. The future felt wide open and uncertain. After years of surviving, I was finally free enough to ask a question I hadn't had the luxury of asking before:
What now?
At the time, I thought the answer might arrive in the form of another person.
Someone who could see me clearly.
Someone who could tell me who I was.
Someone who could give meaning to all the loose threads I carried.
So I searched.
I searched through books, conversations, relationships, spiritual ideas, old stories, and new possibilities. I looked outward with the determination of a traveler convinced that the next turn in the road would finally reveal home.
Around that time, I created this piece.
A single eye painted over pages from vintage magazines from the 1960s. The papers themselves had traveled with me through several homes. They were remnants of another era, filled with advertisements, opinions, headlines, and stories about how life was supposed to be lived.
Looking back, I realize the symbolism was already there.
The eye emerges from a sea of voices.
Thousands of opinions.
Thousands of expectations.
Thousands of answers.
And the eye is not satisfied with any of it.
It's looking beyond the viewer and beyond the noise at something just out of reach.
I never gave the piece a title when I painted it. Maybe I wasn't ready yet.
Today I call it The Long Way Home, borrowed from a Norah Jones song that lived on repeat during that season. At the time, I heard it as a song about longing. About searching. About finding someone who could walk beside me.
Now I hear something different.
The long way home was never a mistake.
The wrong turns were part of the path.
The heartbreaks were part of the path.
The searching was part of the path.
Every attempt to find myself through someone else's eyes eventually led me back to myself.
Years later, I would create works like The Witness, exploring what it means to return to oneself. But the thread was already here. Hidden in plain sight.
This eye was asking the question long before I knew the answer.
Sometimes the long way home is the only way we learn where home truly is.
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The Long Way Home
Mixed media on gallery panel, approximately 20 × 24 inches
