“Has To Be” was the Japanese bonus track on the studio album, Ray of Light. (February 22, 1998). “I should be glad that I’m alive It could have been much worse I might have never loved at all And never known what I am worth.”
The first thing I placed on the west wall of my living room was an original oil painting by, Joe Ramiro Garcia, an artist whom I had met in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
This was the first and only time that he created a custom work of art and I was extremely grateful that he chose to do it for me. I had waited a very long time to hang this masterpiece, which included all of the various elements of the In Search of Christ journey.
I surrounded the piece with historic photographs of the Hopi and handmade crafts gifted to me by Ahote and Tuwa. These items were recovered after my van was stolen in California in November 2022.
I decided to do something very different for the south wall.
My mother went into a nursing home in 1991 and one of my favorite movies of all time, “Fried Green Tomatoes” was released in December of that same year.
That movie hit home with me on so many different levels and was the inspiration behind me filling the walls in my mom’s room with images of cut-out flowers. My mother loved flowers, Purple Bearded Iris being her favorite.
During that time I lived in Durham, North Carolina, and Washington, DC, and every time I came across a greeting card that had images of flowers on it I would buy the card and mail it to my mom. I would retrieve all of the cards that I had mailed from her nightstand during my next visit and pin them to the walls surrounding her bed. I did this religiously for nine, long years until she passed away on January 10, 2000.
After her passing, I returned to her room, took down all of the cards, and placed them in a plastic bag. I brought the bag of cards back to Washington, DC with me where they remained until I left the East Coast in 2005.
I brought the bag of cards with me everywhere I went for the next 19 years and that bag of cards was also in my van when it was stolen. To say that I was thrilled when I recovered the cards was an understatement. I was beyond grateful.
I brought that bag of cards back to North Carolina and within the first 2 weeks created three 24″ x 24″ pieces of wall art and placed them on the south wall of my living room. It had been close to 24 years since my mom passed away and these new pieces of art now served as a celebration for my homecoming.
My brother, my niece’s father, gave me a painted portrait of our father the previous week and I made sure that portrait was hung facing the flowers.
My living room was almost complete.
I loved this song by Madonna because once again the lyrics could be perceived in two different ways. “I know there’s someone out there waiting for me. There must be someone out there. There just has to be.“
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