Home

My recent move from Chicago, a place I called home from 2005 until December of 2024, has had me mulling over how I relate to the idea of home.

When I reflect, I realize I have never experienced a place or location as home. Of course, familiarity, proximity and routine builds comfort and a sense of belonging for me, but growing up I lived in three states (two cross country moves from the ages eight to ten), subsequently my neural pathways were built to look at the quality of relationship as markers for home and I thought little of the structures outside of myself responsible for my sense of true belonging.

Further, as an other in a family of others, I have known my truth to reside internally. The desire to keep up with the Jones’ has never been mine and I have never felt more betrayed by myself than when I have tried my hand at that game. This is true to this day, regardless of how radical and cool any particular Jones is. 

I feel at home in the isolation I crave, the isolation that daws a line to my north star.  Sometimes the loneliest I have felt in my life is when spending time with people who don’t have an interest in me and can’t seem to see my value past what I can do for them or what level of social capital I have. I have always understood mine and others' value to be intrinsic, and long after the day where my body wrinkles beyond attraction and when my bank account can no longer buy me influence, I and others will continue to be a symbol of beauty and worth beyond the material simply because we exist.

Conversely, at times my isolation has brought feelings of hollowness and loneliness and the last place I have wanted to call home was in my body. The difference between these two types of self imposed isolation is my come from - when I have kept myself from respective and mutual care, love, and growth it has been out of fear of hurt and pain. I have isolated myself for fear of the movement life tries to bring in. I kept myself out because at least the cycles of pain I recognized were controllable and not as scary as the potential hurt I had not yet experienced, and that would certainly mimic some aspects of the past. When isolation has felt horrible it has been when I have tried to numb and avoid myself, avoid my truth and the growth edges I’d come to uncomfortably butt up against. At times, isolation has felt like trash because I was just trying to survive. Seasons.

When it’s restorative, I take myself into isolation because I need space to think. I crave presence in my body without influence of direct human energy. I love to tinker, to flit about and to stare out a window for hours. I amuse myself when I tend to the magic in the simplest things and moments and I value spending time with and in the silence of others who value similar ways of being.

Home is not a place for me, it is not a bed in a house or an apartment, nestled in a community. It is a place somewhere inside and it feels like a cohesive one when I tend to it even when I want to run from it. I feel at home outside of myself too - in the wild places that feel as wild as I do at times and in the plush places that feel as soft and calm as I do sometimes. When I tend to my truth, and I don’t always, the times that I am by myself and the times I am in the company of others who are connecting for connections sake, that allow for respective space and communal silliness are the places that feel like home. I can make any place warm. I can make any place cold. Home is when I have the resources - time, energy and space is paramount - to tend to my internal landscape enough to lend to the external spaces I take up. 

It seems strange to write about notions of home against today’s political and global climate but maybe it’s the perfect time to think about what home means. Stubborn attachment and greed to ideologies concerning ‘home’ causes harm.

In a time when people are being disappeared from their home by the United States government without due process or evidence and sent to prisions in a country they have never stepped foot in, when being Palestinian on any land is still punishable to the point of genocide and ethnic cleansing all in pursuit of the resources of their land, when billionaires are being sent off on seven minute space rides by other billionaires so they can make it cool to move our trash and toxic waste to another planet instead of reinvesting those resources into revolutionizing systems to reduce waste and honor the planet they and others reside on - at the very least -, when we demand the destruction of homes and exploitation of bodies in other countries so we can have the latest battery operated gadget (says the dude writing this on their iMac), and when the home that women and trans folks find in their bodies are being controlled, legislated and bound by people with hate in their hearts and power in their hands, these musing seem ineffectual at best.

That’s the point though, ownership of bodies, land, materials and social economics is not a safe space to find home or invest energy. It’s a position that creates harm and has the potential to rob others of their autonomy and the resources that are so plentiful in this day and age. Hyper attachment to land and home and investment in power and status has always created irreparable harm and destruction in every culture and society. Adversely, there have always been the ones who see themselves as stewards to the land and to each other and find honor in respecting its body and the bodies that inhabit and walk upon the earth, even when consumption, destruction and carving out space is in the natural way of things, it is done with a harmless and regenerative spirit.

So, yeah, it’s weird to be writing of home when so many are longing, crying, and dying for theirs, but maybe if societies come from valued the home inside of us a little more it would be hard to harm others in theirs. Pollyannaish? It could be said, but I think the come from is important and shapes things unseen.

Home is not a structure built on land, it cannot be owned. In this sense home can always be destroyed. The land, earth existed before us and it will exist after us. It is fruitful, it is barren, it is beautiful, it is scary as fuck and its value and sovereignty is not dependent on our gaze. Weather patterns, flames and cracks in the earth can remove our feet from this space forever and in an instant and our fear of that drives us to consume material and each other in gross degree.

I think one’s journey in finding and building home can be inherently beautiful and unique - within a reasonable frame- and is not a means for judgment or comparison - for me my body is orienting itself to the new elements of the land, water, air, animals and people of New England and my heart feels at home and welcomed here, despite the culture shock and the discomfort that comes from change. But, change also softens, it molds, it bends, it stimulates growth.

Different strokes, different folks - there are some that spend a lifetime looking for home outside of themselves and others who spend theirs looking for it inside of themselves. I fall in the latter camp and I like to think of home as a verb, as in home is the act of honoring what is inside of you and in front of you and if you can’t honor it, it’s not your home.