Home and its many connotations

“I think we can heal by realizing that ‘home’ is not a place, but a tapestry of relationships. Home is the place we carry in our hearts, that we call into being in the space between.”

~Kai Cheng Thom

I just got done reading a book, Constellating Home, by a Cultural Rhetorician and scholar, V. Jo Hsu. They write from their experiences as an Asian-American, queer disabled person.

The emphasis on home - with the quote above, struck me.

I think it’s because—for a long time —I have felt like I had no home.

Even when people refer to my birthplace/childhood residence as ‘home’, it doesn’t fit. I feel ill at ease with it.

I think it’s because—though the quote above suggests —we carry it in our hearts, the implication therein is that that is positive -

But sometimes, it’s not.

Sometimes the ‘home’ that we carry in our heart is rife with negative memories and influences.

I have moved around a lot and I’ve never lived in my childhood home again, minus for two months when my grandmother was dying, a year after I’d married.

I knew it was not my home and it would never be again.

I chose not to get married in my ‘home’ - much to my mother’s displeasure.

Because it wasn’t a positive association to me - that home.

Even then, I had preferred my new home of Marietta, OH - where I’d attended undergrad.

I appreciate the above quote though because it reminds me that home is not a place - or at least, it doesn’t have to be -

It’s where you carry your heart, where you feel safe.

So, indeed, it can be among a ‘tapestry of relationships’.

I think ‘home’ can also be within you —when you are a safe enough place for yourself to dwell.

For many of us, that’s after healing and nervous system regulation takes place.

I have never really felt like I had a home to ease into, to feel very comfortable with -

I tried to - and there were fleeting glimpses, but I knew I would be moving on -

One of the hardest was leaving Indonesia - the place where I had made my ‘home’ for a half a decade and established community and fell in love with the cultures and languages and collectivism and people there.

And I knew I was relocating - very far from this home that I made - quite literally, to the other side of the world.

I have had to start and restart - making many, many homes, throughout my life.

I am now more stabilized and permanent in my location -

I am finally putting down roots and making my own home.

And I’m establishing myself as home -

The place, the relationship with myself, the community I’m fostering here -

A more selective circle of people.

And for that, I am grateful, to finally have this oikos -

Which, in Greek, means—”home, dwelling, place, habitation.”

In all the manifestations and figurative meanings of that word.

I hope you have or make a home as well.