Home

Home is a category of living.  It is a quality of being.  When you feel at home, you are relaxed and comfortable.  The opposite is feeling away from home, which is to say somewhere where you need to be alert and guarded, unless you are trusting enough to make the Earth your home.

I think people who grow up in violent homes lack what I tend to call, for want of a better term, a place-holder for “home”.  They never felt safe.  They never enjoyed a lasting peace.

Me, I’ve lived in the same place for quite some time, and have needed to do some painting and reorganizing, etc., to make it more into a home, into a place that is recognizably MINE.  Certainly, my decor is ideosyncratic and likely unique, but I have not gone all the way and made everything just so.  I am afraid to become attached to the place.  This is an irrational fear, since I cannot imagine a circumstance in which I would be FORCED to move again.

But it goes deeper: connecting to this place means connecting to the feeling of home, and home scares me.  My home was a place where I got hit, and my parents argued constantly.

So what I am feeling is that as I slowly become aware of all this, as I slowly build my emotional readiness to “nest”, this signified, intrinsically, healing.