[Explorations of a spiritual
and existential theme]
What is a home? What does it mean to ‘have a home;’ to ‘lose
a home?’ What does it mean to be ‘at
home?’”
These questions have fascinated
me for decades. As a poet and thinker I
find these questions have moved me deeply and are at the root of my praxis of
thinking and creating. I am reminded of
them whenever I hear of someone moving into their first apartment or house on
their own, or when I hear of homeless people or people losing their homes, not
to mention their lives, en-masse—as they did this week in the Philippines. My creative life has been tethered to these
questions. There seems to be something
so central to this question for human nature that I cannot stop thinking about
it. It recurs and has come back to me in
a number of forms. Just when I think I
get a handle on it, something happens to call me back to this vortex of
questions.
I have some inkling as to
where the question of ‘home’ came from for
me; what its roots and tendrils were—how it came to be formulated out of
the kaleidoscope of my own early experiences and ruminations. Everyone has their own personal history with
a home, lack of a home, moving from home to home or desiring a new home. My questioning arose through an experienced
comparison between my own natal home with my parents and sister and my
grandmother’s home on a farm in central PA.
These were two positive instances of home, though different. The question of home then emerged as a
literary and philosophical question in the early 1980's, just as I was awakening
from my dogmatic slumbers; coming into my own as a thinker and writer—exploring
the diverse ways in which people live and dwell and make themselves 'at home'
(or not) in the places where they live..
The questions surrounding the
idea of ‘home;’ what home 'is' for us, why we value it, what happens when we
lose it and what it might take to reclaim it – I consider to be deeply
spiritual considerations; they help to form and impact how we live our lives
and the play a role in whether we can live our lives to the fullest, or not. The idea of a ‘home’ is one of those
universals; we ‘recognize’ it, we ‘know’ what the word means, though it is
extremely hard to define. If we are or
become wanderers and wayfarers in the world, it is often through contrast with
being at home or ‘having’ a home that we find self-definition, though it is
entirely possible to live a nomadic life from the beginning, to have ‘home’
mean something more abstract than it does for those of us who live in solid
buildings. Does the nomadic person have
a more abstract concept of ‘home’ – or is their idea of home altogether a different
notion of existence and how to dwell in the Earth & Cosmos?
