It’s the time of year when there is a noticeable emphasis on home.  The magic is all wrapped up in the nostalgia of being with those you love, at home.  There’s a comfort to “I’ll be home for Christmas”, but all of this talk about home has had me thinking,

What is home?

I have searched for home a good portion of my life. I kept expecting it to be made by others, but the kind of home I needed was never going to be provided with throw pillows and a blanket or by another person.

The first word I think of when I say “home” is safe. It’s a harbor, an oasis, an escape. It’s warm and forgiving.  Home is your base (“home”base) and your refueling station.

Can I be blunt?

Many of us think we have a home, but we don’t. We think it’s safe. We think it’s secure. But then, we start to see the cracks. Sometimes, as we sit in our cozy nests, we feel the familiar rejection which we are trying to hide away from, and suddenly we’re not home. We’re just in another place we’d like to escape from.

Often this is evidenced in our bodies. We think they are home. We think they are safe. Then the walls start to move in on us.

For some reason, I am picturing the trash compactor scene in Star Wars. Our first thought is “make it stop” – so we search for the long metal pole to hold back the walls from pushing further in, and suddenly this place we went to hide is about to crush us, despite all our attempts to hold back the walls.  

I think the best word to describe this is: confusing. Wasn’t this our sanctuary? The place we came for peace? And now it’s trying to press us into six square inches of trash?

We get sick and we find our bodies are not home. We don’t trust them anymore. This is when we try to find it in other places, and often, in other people.

If you’re anything like me, security is something you wrestle with all the time. I also tend to try to find it in others. I look to those who know more: the “experts”, but I also seem to have a history of trusting everyone else a bit better than myself.

As I started healing from my illness, I noticed healing itself correlated with the investment I put into personal development.  By that, I mean, unearthing parts of myself I had been afraid to confront before and feeding parts I had been neglecting for years was actually physically healing in addition to emotionally and spiritually healing.

I learned then, and oddly enough, I am relearning now, that home is not something which can be provided or sustained by other people. It’s also not something we can fill with IKEA furniture and THE CUTEST candle holders from Target. 

Home isn’t even “where the heart is”, because, in my opinion, our hearts can be in some crazy messed up places, and home certainly isn’t there.

Often, when the walls start moving in on us, we start shouting into our walkie talkie to C3PO, begging for help. We want someone to rescue us. Stopping the crushing seems an impossible feat on our own, so we scream and scream and scream, but, no-one sticks their droid hand into a control panel and saves us.  Then the next realization occurs: people make terrible heroes.

I know just about every great movie involves the hero on the white horse, or, in the case of the scene I mentioned, a robot taking over the controls to the room. These are fine, and make for great entertainment, but in real life, you have to stop waiting for your hero. In fact, I think it’s pretty dangerous, and quite unfair to expect one.

We need to create our own homes. We need to cultivate a place of safety for. our. selves!

For me, that meant trusting something greater than myself: the river I often talk about. It meant acknowledging that some one was never going to save me, but some thing could.

There is a reason each of us is here. There isn’t reason to everything that happens, but we all have a divine purpose and getting to it means we have to build our own homes, without looking to others to do it for us.

How do we do this? I wish I could hand you the blueprints, but I’m still trying to make sense of my own. I do know we have to start with trusting ourselves.

The first step I took toward wellness was finally accepting I could be trusted, not because I am any sort of genius, but because I was created with a divine compass.

When I trust it, it guides me North. And this is a safe place to be; knowing there is a journey I was made for and trusting I am equipped with everything I need and life will give me everything else I have yet to learn.

What is home?  

It’s you, my friend.  It’s beautiful, wonderful, brave, resilient, you.  It’s the calm and peace inside, knowing you were created for more and trusting the pull toward true North.  So, go home this holiday season.  It won’t be as difficult as you think.