FILE 001: What does it Mean to Come Home?

FILE 001: What Does It Mean to Come Home?

When one hears the word home, it evokes something deep inside of us.

Is it a place of orientation? The place we begin, leave, travel from, and eventually return to?

Home is a very soft word.

When we close our eyes, we can almost picture what our ideal would be. Maybe it’s a hometown we’ve traveled far from. The place where we’re building our family now. A tiny apartment in a big city. A place of peace within ourselves. Or even the treehouse where we spent our youth.

We can feel the word when we slow down long enough to think about it. See, feel, smell, touch or even taste it. 

For thousands of years, humans have oriented themselves around places, cultures, communities, governments, and religions in the search for belonging, meaning, and greater purpose. Long before modern borders or addresses, people created places they returned to, gathered around, buried their dead near, told stories about, and understood as theirs.

And we keep finding home tucked inside our oldest stories.

Odysseus spends years trying to return to Ithaca.
Hestia tends the hearth at the center of the Greek home.
The Roman Vesta makes the sacred flame a symbol not only of household, but community.
Many cultures orient themselves through ancestral lands, sacred landscapes, hearths, thresholds, villages, temples, and places of return.

Even our language remembers it.

Hearth. Homeland. Hometown. Homecoming. Home Page. Home Screen. Home base. Home sick. Home grown. Home key. Group Home. Foster Home. Homebody. Home team. Funeral Home. Childhood home. Broken home. Homeward. Household. 

Home becomes more than shelter.

It becomes orientation.

With home carrying such powerful ideas of inclusion, gathering, belonging, and simply staying, it makes you wonder:

What was home before these places existed?

Perhaps it began much smaller than a house.

Someone became aware of a place. 

They reflected on what it could become. Safety, belonging, comfort, or a state of being. 

And then they made a choice to stay, return, build, gather, or belong.

Awareness. Reflection. Choice.

Maybe we have been making homes this way ever since.

So where do you go home to after a journey?

Or do you carry it somewhere deep within you, wherever you go?

Home: 

Perhaps its coming home to yourself.