Home



I have been trying to find a clear definition of home. 
It is one of those words like love or menopause that is hard to put your finger on.  What is a home?  
I knew exactly where home was when I was a kid.  Home was anyplace my mother was.  If mom was there, things were good and I was home.
Then, like everything else, home evolved.  I became a mother and home was a place I created for my children. I took great pride in making it very clear where their home was.  I tried to be there for them.  I cooked and cleaned and had friends and family over for life’s big events: holidays, birthdays.  I collected things: my mother’s paintings, my father’s piano, artwork and gifts the children had given me.  I planted a garden, got a trampoline and put up a tire swing.   
As the children got older my idea of home evolved again.   Home needed to move closer to where our life was.  That is where things got complicated.  People around me stalled, seeing home as a building to serve, rather than something that served them.   What had once been a home became a burden.   It came with strings that held on, and soon the strings became chains.
The children left, I left, and that sense of home shifted again.  The kids started to create homes for themselves.  My eldest now makes his home anywhere he can entertain friends and keep his climbing gear.  While he always has a place to invite friends and lay his head, I think is he most comfortable, feels most at home, on the top of a mountain. 
My middle son is home anyplace he has space to create: a garden, something he make from wood, a fire.  He is at home on a river with a fishing rod, or on the seat of a machine, creating his magic with big bucket and a job to do.
My youngest is home in a house where his wife and children are happy.  He is home surrounded by their presence and their love. 
Home is any place where people make room for you: where people have to make room because, well, we are family.  Home is where the heart is.  It is a state of the heart, more so than a physical place.  I am so lucky that my heart feels at home in so many places, even in my own head, or on an airplane or in a car.  It is not the destination, but the way we see the world. 
After my children left home, I had to find my place in the world: my new home.  It wasn’t easy at first, as I didn’t know how to be home on my own.  But an apartment in the Omani Outback became home when I discovered I could knock on the window of a new neighbor/ friend and she would come over to smoke shisha, or a cigar.  When my grandson and his family arrived, home gained a layer of richness.
In Australia, home became as simple as a donga in the middle of the Top End. As long as I could connect with people important to me on-line and meet up with school staff for a drink at the end of the week, I was home.  
On visits back to Canada I have always felt at home at Mary’s place in the Kootenays where she provides me with love and friendship and a room with a window where the moon watches me sleep.  In Salmon Arm Rea always makes me feel welcome, and I sleep in the best room in the house, with my own bathroom.  I have stayed at Chris and Paula’s, Sherrill and Royce’s, Travis’s. I know I could stay with so many people and be welcome. 
But right now I am home at Kim and Michael’s in Darwin.  I am in Australia and very much at home.
A home is so many things, but it is not a building or a thing.   It isn’t a place to store a bunch of stuff.  No one needs too many things cluttering up their lives.  Stuff doesn’t make you happy.  A home is where you have only the things you need to make life richer: lucky you if most of those things aren’t things at all, but instead the people that love you.
After many years of travel I have created my own physical space again, a home in Mexico.  My friends and family can, and already have, called that place home now.  After a lot of years travelling about I have finally made a space for them. If I don’t have room, I will make it: you can always sleep on the rooftop.  ‘Mi Casa es su Casa’.
Home can be anywhere:  a caravan, a back bedroom, a huge home on acreage or a small apartment in the city.  Home can be on the sea, on the beach, in the desert: Home is a place where you feel safe: a place where you can relax.  It is a place where you can go and they have to take you in. Home is a place in someone’s heart, and it takes up very little room: in fact, it makes space.   
Many people who wander are not always looking for something: one’s destination is seldom a place.  It is but a new way of seeing things. I have wandered a lot and have looked at life from a lot of perspectives.  How lucky have I been to come to the conclusion that Home is a place in your heart which takes up no room at all. 

People who understand this are free to go anywhere, or not.  The decisions is theirs.   They aren't bound by chains to one particular spot or weighed under by an enormous collection of responsibilities and junk.   They aren't required to stay in one place collecting things, or pack a storage container in order to go anywhere.
  If you truly understand that home is a space in your heart, then really, all you need is a carry on and some good shoes. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Road Trips

What was I scared of?

Christmas 2020