Ep. 4 - Home: Belonging, Space & Freedom to Be
In this episode, we are invited by the COVID-19 quarantine to consider and reflect upon our perception, sense, and feelings of home. Through the pandemic, for many of us, our physical home has become a place where we are spending the majority of time. And yet, existentially, the idea and sense of being at home, homesickness, or even homelessness is far more expansive than a physical place. “What is home?” then becomes a question of where does one find belonging, resonance, and even nostalgia in the world and in oneself? And, how is it for me to be where I am? Existentially, home is where we belong and where we feel our existence comes into being.
Outer Home
As we contemplate where, what, and whom home is for each of us—we consider our dwelling, geography, culture, tradition, our ancestry, our shared humanity, the planet, and our relationships and communities. Our co-host, Xavier, is from South Africa and shares with us three ways of asking about different dimensions of home that the Xhosa people use: Where do you live? Where do you come from? And where is your umbilical cord buried?
We may leave home and return home. We may wander and find a home elsewhere. Sometimes we leave home because of a longing that calls us somewhere else. The Welsh have a word called Hiraeth, meaning, an earnest longing or desire that is often akin to homesickness or nostalgia. Sometimes this is a longing for a place we have never even been to before, and yet it beckons. Sometimes we return to a place or a community that we once considered home, and either it has changed or we have changed. There is a profound grief and preciousness in recognizing and relating to the often impermanent sense of home; that it can be born into, lost, found, and left behind once again. Solastalgia refers to the kind of emotional or existential pain and distress that comes from the homesickness you experience when you are still at home, but perhaps it is changing, slipping away, or now unrecognizable.
There is also comfort in the rhythms, seasons, and structures of the world. That even if the inner sense of home is presently groundless, that the grammar of life and the world may hold us. The sun rises every day, the leaves fall with autumn’s arrival, and the mountains stand their ground with a timeless steadfastness.
Inner Home
Existentially, home is also our inner world. Wherever you go, you are with yourself. We accompany ourselves in our sojourning. Many of us feel a sense of being at home in ourselves, regardless of being in a place we are familiar with or have never been before. We recognize that a passage through grief and wandering may discover and lean into the feeling of being at home with ourselves and in solitude.
There may be pain and suffering in feeling evicted from one’s inner world, too. That there is a sense of no one being home inside—it is quiet, it is void. It is painful to recognize that one’s inner home is decorated with the belongings of another, and that reclaiming home for oneself requires eviction of what does not truly belong. If our inner home has not been nurtured and cared for in our relationships and community, then truly becoming oneself and making oneself at home may present a great risk.
Being outside of societal/family rules and norms grants a certain freedom and homelessness, too. Sometimes you do risk your inner and outer home for authenticity and freedom. It may be that the structures of life or relationships as we knew it cannot tolerate this authenticity. We wonder if coming home to oneself authentically is birthed through a reckoning with the freedom, spaciousness, uncertainty, breakdown of structures, and of wandering in the openness so that we may listen in the vastness for that which truly resonates. There is a rootedness with being at home in oneself; the ground that I carry within me wherever I am.
The Body As Home
The body is where the inner and outer worlds meet. It is our first home in the world; a body within the womb of another body. We pass through states of consciousness, wakefulness and sleep, in our bodies. My body is me. It is also my first point of connection with the world, and that which embeds me in the world.
Through being embodied, we experience the coming together of the outer and the inner world. We experience, we live, and we enter into a relational dialogue with what resonates with us. The body is also impermanent; one day our bodies will pass away and will be kept and digested by the earth. There is ground and a sense of being held by the earth even in death. As the body is our first home, it is also our last.
