Jan 10 2009
Where is Home?
What is home? Is it the place you live? The dwelling, the city, the state or is home a state of mind? I find the lyrics of songs to be a kind of spiritual workbook. Lately much of the music that I hear talks of home and it makes me wonder where is home for me. I am not currently living in the state where I grew up. This is not the first time I moved away. When I left in my twenties my home state did not feel like the “home” in songs. It was a place where I felt stifled and trapped. When I returned there a decade later I felt like I had come “home”. Now another decade later I left because things did not work out for me and my nuclear family. We lost our “home” (like so many others have in these recent times) and could not find affordable housing. My husband and I attributed much of our troubles to the place and so we left. We packed our little family and all our possessions and we ran. We thought we were running to a new start, a new future, a new and brighter beginning. Almost a year has passed and I am finding that I just don’t feel at “home”. I find myself missing the people and places we left behind. At the same time I can’t see going back, because other than the people there is nothing there for us. At the same time I don’t feel like there is anything for us where we are now. So I find myself wondering where is home? I think home is a feeling more than a place. So really I believe I am seeking a feeling that I can not define. Maybe that feeling is safety, security, stability. The problem is I know that those 3 things are really an illusion. It makes me wonder if “home” then is just an illusion. If it is just an illusion then it would follow that it can be created anywhere because an illusion is an inner creation. In the end that is my struggle on this journey, my inner world is out of control. Control is probably a misnomer. My inner world seems to be out of my reach. My thoughts and feelings do not seem to be my choice. I have become dependent on my outer circumstances to dictate my inner world and there is no bigger mistake than to let life dictate your thoughts and feelings. Almost no human being has a perfect circumstantial life. Even the mega wealthy face circumstances that are painful and out of their control. So allowing what happens to you and around you to control how you think and feel is always going to lead to a feeling of dis-ease. So the daily anxiety that I feel emotionally and physically comes from the circumstance I am living. These days, I just don’t feel like I have a home and I am craving the feeling of coming home, of being home and of finding home. So my journey is becoming a search for the fictional place called home.
