My office is a reflection of my mind, papers strewn on the floor, books lying in random places wherever they were placed, boxes full of who knows what, scattered in an unkempt chaos. There is not a single place in my office that reflects complete order and intentionality. Of course, beneath it all is dust, from the lack of stirring. Even the lights are dim.

The situation of both reflects a lack of discipline and, even a bit of depression. The attention they need takes effort and planning: files to be filed, books to be shelved or boxed, some things that just have no pigeon hole, because the prospect of creating one just takes too much energy. Sometimes it means that something has to have a place, even if that place is inaccessible, or admitting that something is useless, even if I'm attached to it. Sometimes the articles are something that must be learned before being assimilated or at least scanned before being discarded.

My desk is the symptom most constantly in view. I have once again reached the place where I cannot lay anything on my desk for fear it will slide off and the slide will become a landslide. The casual observer might think I have "more bars in more places" because the stacks rise to digressively lower heights. The careful analyst, though, will see that the stacks are not even that predictable and flow at their lower levels into one another, creating a symbiosis, an interlocking cacophany of disorganization, procrastination and impending confusion.

In my mind, the stacks are similar: what book will I finish reading, continue writing? What task is most important? What is not being given attention because my energy is not kinetic enough? Some things appear to others to have order, but beneath is the shifting, sliding potential of complete distraction.

Gordon MacDonald says that in his "Private World" the horizontal surfaces reflect his internal order. Perhaps today, a small surface ...

The elements of home are geography, personality, atmosphere and architecture. I was struck by a piece in the Mennonite Weekly Review about missionary kids and their struggle to identify their home ... host country, sending country. I empathize. I have often felt a void when it comes to the comfortable feelings that people associate with a particular place.

The feelings are illustrated in a short story by Gordon R. Dickson, "Lulungameena". In it, a grifter is forced to acknowledge the subjective beauty of "home," even if "home" is a ravaged and desolate place. Two people use the word to identify vastly different places with exactly the same sentiment. When I read or hear that story, I ask, "where is home?"

The answer is not so simple. I was born near Detroit and my dad's folks live in those regions. As a middle schooler I moved with family to rural North Carolina, where my mother's folks are from. I lived there till I joined the Navy. The natural geographical solution should be Michigan, but when we lived there we moved often and our extended family relationships were punctuated with family politics. Our moves made me an uncomfortable classmate, so lasting friendships were not forged either. Leaving for North Carolina created a disconnect so that now the landscape and the Michigan family is changed so much they are scarcely recognizable.

Since my biological family still lives in North Carolina, that might be the next natural answer, but some similar dynamics apply there too. We continued to move often, so I changed schools too regularly to form lasting friendships. I have only one real friend from my youth, a man I know from the last school I attended my junior and senior years. Extended family down south is also a complicated mix of politics and prejudices, so I am not close to them either.

Home is a matrix of memory. It is the establishment of associations with instinct. It is the creation of a framework in which to hang our comfort like a coat in a closet. It belongs. It fits. It gives setting for the plot of our story, for the roots of our expectations. Life makes sense at home.

One would think that the current dwelling of my biological family is the next logical place to look. However, presence of family is not the whole of home. I certainly value visiting my parents and siblings, but where they live is not my home. It is their house. I've never lived there and have no associations with the place. All the moving we did robs me of any "home" feeling attached to any one place.

At last I find myself back in my own living room with my wife, the family of my choice. I have lived in Norma, New Jersey three times as long as anyplace somebody might call "home." But this is not home either. It is not seasoned with primal memory. It is not familiar in any deep sense of the word.

Our society is mythically transient. In the 1800s our country's mobile dynamic was defined by a single compass direction, West. The adventurous were called to leave by slow and cumbersome means for a vague life somewhere toward the sunset. Trains defined the dynamic of our nation by the early 1900s, cars replaced them in the middle portion of the century, and jets in the later. We were not simply mobile, but the direction of our mobility became discretionary, unguided by even a rail, and eventually even by a road or ground on which to build it. in the 2000s our dynamic is even less definable. Our mobility is virtual, even global, finding paths via satelites in orbit. Using the internet, it is normal to travel all over the world to instantly message the person in the next room.

Hence, our matrices are dissipating to create understanding between peoples of vastly different matrices. We no longer work a single job for life, and moving is part of the plan. No wonder real-estate ostentation led our nation to economic collapse. We could not expect home to be comforting. We had no lapsing time to invest in our home's atmosphere, its memory matrix, so we substituted with appeal. But no one can afford enough appeal to make up for belonging.

Our retirement is an "individual" retirement account, not a group pension plan. We don't have homes, we have home pages and we can access them anywhere. Many have completely given up a home phone for a mobile phone. Gone is the geography, the architecture, even the atmosphere of home. Associations are all that remain. Those associations, my associations, are ever shrinking, ever more conected not to my surroundings but to my person.

This may explain my predelictions in clothing. I am inclined to comfort. My clothes do not express something I want to exude, but a place I want to exist, to be. Like home, my clothing design becomes my most intimate architecture, its ornimentaion, my atmosphere. My appearance becomes my hospitality. By wearing what I prefer, I invite others into my home. Others' responses to my appearance become judgements not just on how I look, but on how I live, what makes me belong.

Likely, the rest of my life will be shaped by an unintentional search for home. I am saddened by the truth that I may never find it. I have nothing upon which to base a sense of arrival, no reason to sigh with relief, pursuing an elusive contentment. I am jealous of those who have life-long friends. I walk into no place and unresevedly belong. I have jokingly said that heaven will be a library, but I don't really think that. Heaven will be home.