This November, MHT is participating in the Miry’s List Friendsgiving Fundraising Drive. The money goes to programs that support refugee families that have been resettled in the United States. In tandem with these efforts, our clinicians are writing posts reflecting on what home means to them.
“Blue songs are like tattoos
You know I’ve been to sea before
Crown and anchor me
Or let me sail away.”
- Joni Mitchell, “Blue”
‘Home’ is a word of layers - a concept whose meaning lives in spatial, literal, metaphorical and feeling realities. Home can be a place, a sensation, a longing, even a relationship; most interestingly, home can coexist in all these planes of understanding without contradiction. In exploring the idea of home this season at MHT, I have chosen a word that, like home, contains multitudes.
Blue is Joni Mitchell’s fourth studio album, released in 1971. She wrote and sang every song on the record, including the song Blue, quoted above. This Blue-within-Blue was a melancholy swirl of rock-n-roll love, in line with the album’s theme of the excruciating lows and soaring highs of relationships. Joni Mitchell captures in yearning minutes-long fragments that which takes many of us years of devoted labor to bring to consciousness and communication. Blue is, to me, one layer of home; the sound of an aching heart, a woman full of love.
Blue is my mother’s favorite color; it was the color of my childhood home; it the colloquial term for sadness, which I would prefer to understand as longing. Blue is the color of the wide sky and the shifting oceans. As a therapist, there is great appeal to me of something so small which can contain so much. Home can provide another kind of expansive containment, a sense of familiarity and belonging that can hold us when we need to be held and also let us wander freely without fear of losing our way back. Home is often one of those spaces that we are aware of only as we leave and return to it; home is perhaps more a sensation of change than it is a signal of constancy. I first experienced Joni Mitchell’s Blue after graduating college, alone in an empty apartment in a city far from where I grew up. Listening to her Blue felt like coming home.
“Home is often one of those spaces that we are aware of only as we leave and return to it; home is perhaps more a sensation of change than it is a signal of constancy. ”
HERE'S HOW YOU CAN PARTICIPATE IN FRIENDSGIVING WITH US:
Give! Visit our Miry’s List campaign page and make a donation. It's that simple and no sum is too small. Truly.
Follow! Be sure to follow us on Instagram and our blog throughout the month of November. We will be reflecting on what it means to be welcomed, received, and known.
Share! Help us spread the word. You can do this by sharing our social media posts or links to our Miry’s List Friendsgiving Fundraiser page.
******
A little about Miry’s List:
Refugee families come to the United States seeking a safe haven from violence and persecution in their home countries. They leave behind family and friends, as well as virtually everything they own. Many Americans, seeing these families in their communities, wonder: What can I do to help? Miry's List provides a mechanism for people to directly help new arrival refugee families with the things that they need to get started in their new lives – from diapers to beds to cleaning supplies and toiletries. To learn more, visit miryslist.org.
Broghan Hedges, MSW, is an Associate Clinical Social Worker ASW #90498, working under the professional supervision of Michelle Harwell, PsyD, LMFT 50732. She is passionate about helping the parent-child relationship flourish and has extensive experience serving families impacted by autism, adoption, and substance abuse.