Home Is A Mountain

I am deeply disturbed by all our brothers and sisters who have been un-homed – the ferocious tail of wildfires, the global surge of migrants in search of sustenance, the refugees in search of safety, the undone homeless circling the system, those endlessly incarcerated. For the countless un-homed, i offer this homage to home.

Home is a mountain. Home is a tree. Home is the smell of freshly baked bread, cinnamon and rose perfume. Home is crisp sheets and rain-soaked curtains. Fireflies and cool summer breezes. The creaking stair and the reassuring ticking of the hallway clock.

Home is a feeling. Homesick, homeless, broken, home at last. It is the laughing, the heartbreaks, the worrisome omens and the chicken soup fevers. Home is long dark hours waiting for sunrise as well as languid sun-soaked afternoons. We savor the memories, hopes, angry arguments and tearful reconciliations. It lives in the imperfections of ambiguous origin – the crack in the wall, the missing bannister newel, the wall switch that does nothing. It is joy and delight, dread and remorse we recognize by a resonance in our heart.

Home is a place of forever leaving and forever returning. We leave, escape, elope, even run away and then find ourselves longing to return. It’s both destination and devastation of an eternal seeking. Home is the unceded womb of our original un-homing. A mythology from which every hero journeys to find that upon their return home is never the home they left — not because it changed but because they did. It is both that which we long for and the very longing itself.

Home is the people who matter the most. A spirit of being, created solely by virtue of the lives lived within its domain - not defined by structure or geography but by inhabitation – family, friends, transient guests and ghosts. Let us not forget the ghosts that breathe in the shadows of every well-lived home, roaming the bardo that is both delta and headwaters and everything in between.

Home cannot be architected, bought or built. A house is not a home for a home can only be made — not through the product of work but as the result of labor. The slow animal dance of heart labor across time and space. It is an outcropping of pulse and breath. The accommodation of accumulation of trinkets and memories, stories and dust, and the holy ordinariness alive in the gaps.

Home is an unfinishable sentence that we make and which makes us. The search for home is home in search of itself. All longing is but a cry for home — the sacred covenant between us and the earth that we belong and that there is a place that can hold us in the grace of the world.