A silk purse can’t be made from a sow’s ear

Have you ever walked into a space, a room, residence, store or office and been put off by the vibe? Or, likewise, liked it?

That’s because spaces and places have their own vibrations and character, stories and histories — their own fingerprints like humans.

“Any place can be made into a home,” someone recently commented. Spoken like one who hasn’t traveled, moved much or is simply unaware of or not attuned to a place’s energies.

Those words written in January 2011 preface eight pages in my journal on a subject that is my passion and gift: spaces and places.

I got to contemplating some of the spaces where I’ve parked myself (travels excluded, of course), the spaces that I’ve called home — or more pertinently not home.

Excluding childhood homes, the worst spaces I’ve lived in are two: an old apartment in the Tokyo suburbs (residence 1991/2) and my current (2008-present).

While loose, their similarities don’t escape my notice. Both are tired, weary and neglected on some level by the owners. Both are cold and dark, ever in the shadow of any passing sunlight. Both are sad; even an insensitive could pick that up, I reckon.

Both are haunted, though in all fairness the hauntings in my current abode are far more rigorous and ever-present than in the Japanese counterpart; neither are present the vibrations and odors of violence and death (by murder and suicide) characterizing and polluting my current abode.

I would love to see someone turn a space with that history into a home!

Catastrophes, traumas and sordid events impact and stain the spaces and places on which they occurred. If ever you’ve visited Dachau, Auschwitz or Gettysburg cemetery, the truth that places hold histories and vibrations could not be delivered with more clarity.

Does that suggest that all places/spaces upon which hardship, violence and the like are ‘marked?’ No and now it gets complicated and too complex for the purposes of this discussion.

It’s all in the vibe, the stuff etheric expressed in a language audible only to heart and spirit.

I’m saddened for the commenter unable to see the uniqueness and individual essences within each space and place, rendering some positive and uplifting for residence and others toxic, draining, dangerous, even uninhabitable.

Can any place be made a home? Absolutely not. And I can tell you that apartment G in Tacoma is no home, no home at all. It’s a prison cell. And tomb.

Such are the last words in that entry but not the final ones on the apartment, whose heinous energies seep the walls and soil and ceiling and crevices.

No place has triggered the volume of writings that this apartment has. None makes the blog (not the right readership) yet like the seedlings of light that they are, they scream for air and release from the Darkness and the darkness of the apartment from which sprung and publication. One day, at the right printed place …

Can every place be made home sweet home? No.

Some places are best salted and cemented and buried with the the dead that they house. Apartment G in Tacoma is one such place.

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