Hello, you marvelous folks, and welcome back to Threads!
For those of you who are newer to the Going Solo conversation, Threads is our discussion forum, a chance to get to know each other and a great space to talk amongst ourselves, so let's get to it.
Here's what I'm hoping we can talk about this week: home.
And here's why. I've been in California the past few weeks. Maybe it's fitting that with the whole wide world at my feet, six brand new tires between the camper and the truck, nowhere I have to be and nowhere I don't want to go, I've drifted right back to where I'm from. Fifty years on the planet, and the planet is round; what are the odds that I'd wind up where I began? Maybe my little bird brain really is wired with some kind of homing instinct; or perhaps, as James Baldwin wrote, in his novel Giovanni's Room, “Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
And then there’s this, also from Giovanni's Room:
“Why, you will go home and then you will find that home is not home any more. Then you will really be in trouble. As long as you stay here, you can always think: One day I will go home.”
So what is home, to you? Is it a place? A person or people? "[A]n irrevocable condition"? Idea, invention, heat mirage, fantasy, dream?
When you don't have one—whether by choice, necessity, or default—I'll tell you, the word hits different. I know how it hits me, but let’s talk about it. How does the word home hit you?
Take as much or as little space as you like here, folks, but please do pipe up and make your voice heard. So glad you're here.
I once wrote something...I called it a poem, but it was about home, and what it was to me. The essence of that still stands. I self published it, but with your kind invitation, I will post it here.
No self promotion intended, just words that say it for me.
Home is a confusing term, when families fall apart.
Is it where you were born?
Where you live now?
Where you were raised?
Where your ancestral genes were bleached by a younger sun,
stone washed in a pool of blood
mingled with dirt, the dead and DNA?
Is home where your heart is?
If so my heart is many places.
Tramp like, it is incessant
travelling old roads looking for new answers,
the solurtions to long lost causes.
My life is a packed supermarket trolley
with a squeaky wheel.
My home is a mosaic of lost dreams,
flashes of failure,
warm red regrets and wilder red joy.
A fragmented and welcoming hearth,
colour for colour
pieced together like a lost map
back to some other time in the future.
Home is where I could feel most loved,
most able to be myself,
where I could be the piece of gum
that leaps out of the packet into your mouth
or the plastic bag at the supermarket that immediately opens up to you
Home is where I can be myself completely, especially since I live alone. It’s where I have true self-consciousness, not preoccupation with what others think of me.
My body is my home, or my brain, or my heart - some combination of the three; when I can’t get comfortable in my skin I sidestep into intellect or emotion. Embodiment is a practice and I am getting there, but I cannot be there all the time. Technically I have an apartment and when I say “I’m going home” it’s to this building I pay too much to reside in & where my cats greet me. I feel more at ease in the forest than in buildings, but have not yet made good on my frequent jokes of disappearing into the woods, never to be seen again. I’m not convinced a place will ever be home and even this body feels like a temporary one — then again, of course, it is temporary.
Home is where your soul flies free. It’s a feeling of deep belonging. A place where you feel your roots immediately plunge into Mother Earth and take hold. The wellspring of energy from mother fills you with abundant joy in the place you feel connected to home and the sweet stream of well being.
oh boy... here I go. My daughter once made me a needlepoint...yeah, she stitched it and its made to hang up. It reads , "Home is where your mom is." oh my gosh. I am so thankful she has the life experience to say something like that, let alone stitch it. Home for me away from my dysfunctional home of origin has always been a sanctuary. A place that is safe for me to be me. Free from shame, blame and judgement. I can be as arty and quirky as I am. I can listen to the music I love, I can have pets... I can have stacks of books everywhere and not one single person is complaining about how i am being me. i love my home. my adult children love coming home and i love that too, that they feel safe coming home.
Oh, Marya, you probably know I love this question. Or at least you probably figure that, as a fellow wanderer, I've contemplated it a whole lot. I think, honestly, home is me. I think I've been trying to learn that for a long time. What I mean is that I've lived out of a backpack or the saddlebag of a bike or a vehicle. I've rolled up here or there to pass days at the homes of friends and loved ones or to sleep alongside strangers. So, I've considered the question carefully: What are the essentials, the absolutes, I need with me in order to feel comfortable (at home)? Over the years, I've answered that in a variety of ways. A few things have remained on all the lists, a notebook to write in, a shirt I feel good in, for example. Only recently, I'm coming to understand that the truth is there's one thing I need to feel at home wherever I go--me. If I step into and show up fully as who I am, the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful, the everything in between, and who I'm wanting to become, wherever I find myself, I'll be home.
Thanks for asking and making a space for me to wax philosophical on the subject, my wandering friend.
A dear friend felt displaced - had moved here from Mexico. After many years was fueled by desire to find herself and ground that to a place. She went to Europe came back after half a year. A year later took off again only to return. She felt rootless. She visited her parents. Stayed a week then two - was offered a summer teaching position. Six years later finds her self and all her potential two blocks from where she was born.
I’ve never felt like I’ve connected “home” to a place or to other people. My family asks me to come “home” to the suburbs of Minneapolis, but it never felt comfortable to me there. “Home” where I was born in Pittsburgh and where I consider where I am from is somewhere I visit and stay in a hotel now, a tourist.
I cannot imagine not living in New York City, so I suppose it is “home” in a way now. It’s the only place I have been eager to return to in my life, but I think that is more because of what I get to do there than anything.
Ultimately, I think “home” for me is the dialogue between my body and the air when I have two blades on my feet and I can fly and spin and twist through space until I know how I feel. It has never mattered where I am, just that I have that one thing that I do which makes me feel complete.
For various complicated reasons, I did not grow up feeling embraced or accepted, or "at home" with my biological family. I still don't - even now, those relationships are stilted on a good day. The first place I think I experienced what others describe as "feeling at home" was in graduate school. The professors behaved like parents while we students cried, panicked, or celebrated, and eventually most of us leveled out, grew up and left the nest.
Because I was a part-time student, I took longer than the others and was able to watch as a few classes came in as babies and left as fledgling adults. A few years after I graduated, I returned as an adjunct professor, where, for over 10 years, I've helped "raise" the next generation of students. I told every class about how I still felt like I could show up anytime to the third floor of the Basic Science building and know that there would be someone there who was happy to see me and welcoming me home.
A few years ago, the founder of the program, our "Grandpa" so to speak, passed away after a long illness. Things began to decline after that - first slowly and then all at once. This year, while teaching about the risk that outsourcing poses to our drug supply chain, one of the Chinese students manipulated a lesson and claimed I was "anti-Chinese" (I only pointed out recent publications by the US Congress highlighting the threat from China in particular). Sadly, my family - or what remained of it - turned on me, supporting a stranger over me. Suddenly, I find myself homeless again. At least it's a familiar feeling.
It's funny, I was thinking about this recently under unanticipated circumstances. I was entering the little community park near my home when my son pinched his finger in the gate latch. He cried and immediately wailed through his tears, "I want to go home!"
We didn't go home.
I kneeled on the sidewalk and hugged him and rocked him, kissed his finger and told him I loved him, and he eventually, surprisingly quickly, quieted. When I asked him if he wanted a bandaid, he declined and disengaged himself from my arms. He ran towards the carousel building where his friends were, called over his shoulder before I was even fully standing on my numb legs, "I'm ok. My finger doesn't hurt anymore."
I had this sudden, uninflected thought as I watched him recede, "I wish I had told him that I'm his home."
But this is something that can't really be said and immediately accepted. Maybe both of my children will come to that sort of conclusion, in the way that you say, "I'm going home," and you really mean that you're going to wherever your parents are. But I feel like I can no longer say that because my parents moved out of my hometown, out of my home state, and it now feels more accurate to describe any travel to see them as "visiting my parents."
Ironically though, I also always felt like New Jersey was imposed on me as a "home". I never planned to stay in the Garden State, I left as soon as I could, and I don't feel terribly sad that there is absolutely nothing that would compel me to return to my childhood town.
When I visit my in-laws, my wife still refers to leaving for her place-of-growing-up as "going home" and I've wondered if she would also think of it differently if she weren't going to that specific location on the map. Probably.
Where my house is and the town where I have put out some clinging tendrils is where I call home. I think about the concept of home often because I lived a semi-transient life before I stopped where I currently am, and I don't necessarily anticipate staying right here for the rest of my life. The idea of living in a place so long that my children consider the place their home is a little enchanting, though I can't determine objectively if that's because it was my own first perception of "home."
I think about what I would call home if I didn't have this titled space with my name on it. Would "home" then be whatever physical space I occupy? Or would it be whatever space my loved ones occupy? If I had no loved ones to share space with, would home be wherever I am? Or would I simply consider myself to be without a home? Is home the comfort of familiar space or the comfort of my book familiars, which are the only objects I consistently toted from one place to the next, one vehicle to the next? I don't know. I feel like there is a luxury in contemplating this while I inhabit a place I call home.
Home: it can be a fluid thing, interior and exterior. We can have more than one home. I recall the great Frost quote, "home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in," meaning home is a place you can't be rejected from, no matter how broken you are. This can be more than one place, and any of us are lucky to even have ONE place like that.
But ultimately I suspect it is a little bit more than that. You can be taken in by people who love you, but I believe it is a place not just where you are comfortable in and out of your skin, but a place or state of being that CALLS to us, calls us to serve the thing that has made home great for us.
And all of this idea of home...is not exclusive, is not static, is not fixed...like soulmates, like work, like life.
I once wrote something...I called it a poem, but it was about home, and what it was to me. The essence of that still stands. I self published it, but with your kind invitation, I will post it here.
No self promotion intended, just words that say it for me.
Home is a confusing term, when families fall apart.
Is it where you were born?
Where you live now?
Where you were raised?
Where your ancestral genes were bleached by a younger sun,
stone washed in a pool of blood
mingled with dirt, the dead and DNA?
Is home where your heart is?
If so my heart is many places.
Tramp like, it is incessant
travelling old roads looking for new answers,
the solurtions to long lost causes.
My life is a packed supermarket trolley
with a squeaky wheel.
My home is a mosaic of lost dreams,
flashes of failure,
warm red regrets and wilder red joy.
A fragmented and welcoming hearth,
colour for colour
pieced together like a lost map
back to some other time in the future.
Home is where I could feel most loved,
most able to be myself,
where I could be the piece of gum
that leaps out of the packet into your mouth
or the plastic bag at the supermarket that immediately opens up to you
on a day you desperately need it to.
Maybe home is where the fire burns,
where you are most understood
in the light and cackle of laughing
red flames licking
the roof of your mouth.
Where you smile at the memory
of warm glances,
the smell and feel of friendly garments,
where touch and acceptance
welcome excess and survive famine.
Where in the end
your feet cross the doorstep
to the sound of clapping,
the wagging tail
of someone excited to see you.
Good to see you,
to see you good.
© Graham Hughes 2010
Thank you for inviting length. :-)
and a response
Home is where I can be myself completely, especially since I live alone. It’s where I have true self-consciousness, not preoccupation with what others think of me.
Another Holly! Hi there. And great answer.
My body is my home, or my brain, or my heart - some combination of the three; when I can’t get comfortable in my skin I sidestep into intellect or emotion. Embodiment is a practice and I am getting there, but I cannot be there all the time. Technically I have an apartment and when I say “I’m going home” it’s to this building I pay too much to reside in & where my cats greet me. I feel more at ease in the forest than in buildings, but have not yet made good on my frequent jokes of disappearing into the woods, never to be seen again. I’m not convinced a place will ever be home and even this body feels like a temporary one — then again, of course, it is temporary.
Home is where your soul flies free. It’s a feeling of deep belonging. A place where you feel your roots immediately plunge into Mother Earth and take hold. The wellspring of energy from mother fills you with abundant joy in the place you feel connected to home and the sweet stream of well being.
oh boy... here I go. My daughter once made me a needlepoint...yeah, she stitched it and its made to hang up. It reads , "Home is where your mom is." oh my gosh. I am so thankful she has the life experience to say something like that, let alone stitch it. Home for me away from my dysfunctional home of origin has always been a sanctuary. A place that is safe for me to be me. Free from shame, blame and judgement. I can be as arty and quirky as I am. I can listen to the music I love, I can have pets... I can have stacks of books everywhere and not one single person is complaining about how i am being me. i love my home. my adult children love coming home and i love that too, that they feel safe coming home.
Oh, Marya, you probably know I love this question. Or at least you probably figure that, as a fellow wanderer, I've contemplated it a whole lot. I think, honestly, home is me. I think I've been trying to learn that for a long time. What I mean is that I've lived out of a backpack or the saddlebag of a bike or a vehicle. I've rolled up here or there to pass days at the homes of friends and loved ones or to sleep alongside strangers. So, I've considered the question carefully: What are the essentials, the absolutes, I need with me in order to feel comfortable (at home)? Over the years, I've answered that in a variety of ways. A few things have remained on all the lists, a notebook to write in, a shirt I feel good in, for example. Only recently, I'm coming to understand that the truth is there's one thing I need to feel at home wherever I go--me. If I step into and show up fully as who I am, the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful, the everything in between, and who I'm wanting to become, wherever I find myself, I'll be home.
Thanks for asking and making a space for me to wax philosophical on the subject, my wandering friend.
A dear friend felt displaced - had moved here from Mexico. After many years was fueled by desire to find herself and ground that to a place. She went to Europe came back after half a year. A year later took off again only to return. She felt rootless. She visited her parents. Stayed a week then two - was offered a summer teaching position. Six years later finds her self and all her potential two blocks from where she was born.
I’ve never felt like I’ve connected “home” to a place or to other people. My family asks me to come “home” to the suburbs of Minneapolis, but it never felt comfortable to me there. “Home” where I was born in Pittsburgh and where I consider where I am from is somewhere I visit and stay in a hotel now, a tourist.
I cannot imagine not living in New York City, so I suppose it is “home” in a way now. It’s the only place I have been eager to return to in my life, but I think that is more because of what I get to do there than anything.
Ultimately, I think “home” for me is the dialogue between my body and the air when I have two blades on my feet and I can fly and spin and twist through space until I know how I feel. It has never mattered where I am, just that I have that one thing that I do which makes me feel complete.
I am my home. So wherever I am, my home is. It's up to me to place myself in positive, peaceful surroundings.
For various complicated reasons, I did not grow up feeling embraced or accepted, or "at home" with my biological family. I still don't - even now, those relationships are stilted on a good day. The first place I think I experienced what others describe as "feeling at home" was in graduate school. The professors behaved like parents while we students cried, panicked, or celebrated, and eventually most of us leveled out, grew up and left the nest.
Because I was a part-time student, I took longer than the others and was able to watch as a few classes came in as babies and left as fledgling adults. A few years after I graduated, I returned as an adjunct professor, where, for over 10 years, I've helped "raise" the next generation of students. I told every class about how I still felt like I could show up anytime to the third floor of the Basic Science building and know that there would be someone there who was happy to see me and welcoming me home.
A few years ago, the founder of the program, our "Grandpa" so to speak, passed away after a long illness. Things began to decline after that - first slowly and then all at once. This year, while teaching about the risk that outsourcing poses to our drug supply chain, one of the Chinese students manipulated a lesson and claimed I was "anti-Chinese" (I only pointed out recent publications by the US Congress highlighting the threat from China in particular). Sadly, my family - or what remained of it - turned on me, supporting a stranger over me. Suddenly, I find myself homeless again. At least it's a familiar feeling.
It's funny, I was thinking about this recently under unanticipated circumstances. I was entering the little community park near my home when my son pinched his finger in the gate latch. He cried and immediately wailed through his tears, "I want to go home!"
We didn't go home.
I kneeled on the sidewalk and hugged him and rocked him, kissed his finger and told him I loved him, and he eventually, surprisingly quickly, quieted. When I asked him if he wanted a bandaid, he declined and disengaged himself from my arms. He ran towards the carousel building where his friends were, called over his shoulder before I was even fully standing on my numb legs, "I'm ok. My finger doesn't hurt anymore."
I had this sudden, uninflected thought as I watched him recede, "I wish I had told him that I'm his home."
But this is something that can't really be said and immediately accepted. Maybe both of my children will come to that sort of conclusion, in the way that you say, "I'm going home," and you really mean that you're going to wherever your parents are. But I feel like I can no longer say that because my parents moved out of my hometown, out of my home state, and it now feels more accurate to describe any travel to see them as "visiting my parents."
Ironically though, I also always felt like New Jersey was imposed on me as a "home". I never planned to stay in the Garden State, I left as soon as I could, and I don't feel terribly sad that there is absolutely nothing that would compel me to return to my childhood town.
When I visit my in-laws, my wife still refers to leaving for her place-of-growing-up as "going home" and I've wondered if she would also think of it differently if she weren't going to that specific location on the map. Probably.
Where my house is and the town where I have put out some clinging tendrils is where I call home. I think about the concept of home often because I lived a semi-transient life before I stopped where I currently am, and I don't necessarily anticipate staying right here for the rest of my life. The idea of living in a place so long that my children consider the place their home is a little enchanting, though I can't determine objectively if that's because it was my own first perception of "home."
I think about what I would call home if I didn't have this titled space with my name on it. Would "home" then be whatever physical space I occupy? Or would it be whatever space my loved ones occupy? If I had no loved ones to share space with, would home be wherever I am? Or would I simply consider myself to be without a home? Is home the comfort of familiar space or the comfort of my book familiars, which are the only objects I consistently toted from one place to the next, one vehicle to the next? I don't know. I feel like there is a luxury in contemplating this while I inhabit a place I call home.
Home: it can be a fluid thing, interior and exterior. We can have more than one home. I recall the great Frost quote, "home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in," meaning home is a place you can't be rejected from, no matter how broken you are. This can be more than one place, and any of us are lucky to even have ONE place like that.
But ultimately I suspect it is a little bit more than that. You can be taken in by people who love you, but I believe it is a place not just where you are comfortable in and out of your skin, but a place or state of being that CALLS to us, calls us to serve the thing that has made home great for us.
And all of this idea of home...is not exclusive, is not static, is not fixed...like soulmates, like work, like life.