Still looking for a place to call home

My friend Mary gave me a call this afternoon to let me know that one of my favorite singers in the world, Judith Owen, was on WWL radio New Orleans and that I could listen to it online. Judith is in New Orleans to play at my favorite venue anywhere, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art for their Thursday night concert. I checked her website and she'll be in San Francisco at The Makeout Room in two weeks and I'll be there to hear it. Judith, and her husband Harry Shearer, live, like me, in two places and, since Katrina, have been back and forth many times. In their case it's NOLA and Santa Monica. Thanks to the Simpsons they have resources to live in two places that I do not at this point possess, but the draw and the catch that moves them to be in both places is echoed precisely in my own experience.

This little interlude from New Orleans comes at the peak of several things that have been going on over the last few days. I've been working hard to complete material for the Churches Supporting Churches website (complete with fabulous Flash opening created by Hoz) and discussions with folks near and far about a trip I'll soon be making to New Orleans and then on to Ohio to speak to people about New Orleans. It all comes back around, like happens so often, to the sense that I am still deeply out of place. I have been in California for just over three months and I've been thinking I might stay here for another three months before heading back to The Crescent City, but there's no way I can hold out that long.

This is who I am... My heart lives in San Francisco AND New Orleans. I keep trying to delineate some kind of separation but it's never going to happen. I am of two minds, I possess two souls, I have two homes (and no home at all).

Now, I just have to figure out how to survive it.