“Exile in our own time is more than enduring strange foods and finding one’s way on unfamiliar terrain. Exile means that you are not at home. You are in a place where you do not want to be, leaving home without a change of address. More to the point, you are in a place where you are not wanted… The frail aged are exiled, even when they are residents in comfortable “facilities”—the word “home” is too ironic to be used in this context. There are those who have lost memory and speech, those who fill our prisons, those without home, those who are shunned deliberately or unconsciously by those closest to them. Our world is filled with exiles.
How can they sing when they are so far from home? And where is home? And how do they find it again?”
–Margaret Guenther, Walking Home, p. 50
