Where is Home?
All journeys must end, and at some point we all have to return home. Though do we really know where that is?
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All journeys must end, and at some point we all have to return home.
This could be made that bit harder if we don’t know where home is anymore. Ask yourself: where exactly is your Home? Is it where you are right now? Is it where you were born and raised? I know already there’s contention – for many people Home is where they originate from and spent their formative years; for US citizens though I’ve found, for example, that the question “Where are you from?” is often answered with the place they currently reside – where one has made their home (though I suppose it’s also often answered with something like “Cork, Ireland” by someone from Wisconsin who claims to be fifth generation Irish).
If you aren’t sure of the answer to the question, or even what the question means, maybe first we have to ask: What is Home?
Irish mystic poet and scholar John O’Donohue wrote about Home as a place that one belongs to in the world, though he doesn’t refer to any aesthetic or cultural qualities of places, whether objective or subjective – accents and clothing and foods and the colour of one’s skin and so on – nor does he speak of one’s place of origin.
Instead he said that, rather than being a state or a trait or something one possesses, belonging is an “art”, the practice of which is the “recovery of the wisdom of rhythm”.
Home is the place – or any place – where we can find comfort and joy in order rather than in freedom.
On an episode of the pleasantly enlightening podcast This Jungian Life (in which a trio of psychoanalysts from the US dissect an intriguing variety of psychoanalytic and psychospiritual themes from a Jungian perspective – I would highly recommend listening, the hosts creating an appropriately homely atmosphere for discussion in each episode, and my writing – as I’m sure many of you are aware – being consciously and unconsciously highly informed by the work of Carl Jung) on the topic of Homesickness (which I will of course come to myself in good time), our hosts discuss what Home means to us in the first place.
Our sense of Home is something we associate with things in their original, peaceful state – a state before the ups and downs and events and the course of our lives shaped us into something more layered, something that’s been weathered, like a tree out on the Atlantic coast, rather than the perfect, unwrinkled version you might see in a garden.
This original, unblemished state could even be traced back as far as the womb, if life wasn’t particularly smooth from the moment we left it, as is certainly the case far too often. “Home, in a sense” our hosts tell us, “is a continuation of the narrative thus far in one’s life.”
Remaining at Home is an untenable state, and part of life is that inevitably, at some stage, we must leave the safety of Home and go on some sort of journey of our own – to find and establish our own Home, which could be locally (another sense of the meaning of home – your home town or country) or in another part of the world entirely.
We have an energetic attachment to the place where we originate. And as we grow we can either choose to sever this attachment, or integrate it into our adult lives. For some, they may not have a choice, it can either something that has to be done, or cannot be done under any circumstances. Life hands us different paths.
Ireland is a funny country in that it’s a small place with a small population, and one made up of a scattering of what, on a global scale, are essentially villages, with a few towns. Across the entire country, everyone seems to know one another, and you’re never more than two degrees of separation from anyone you meet.
It is a very difficult place in which to truly leave home.
The best you can manage is to live a few hours away, though travel time isn’t really the point – it’s one thing to have a long drive home at the weekends or Christmas (and three hours is only a long drive in Ireland), it’s another thing to completely sever your psychological attachments to your childhood and adolescence.
They remain with you in the subtlest of ways.
It’s possible to have more than one Home, and to make a Home for yourself in a place that is utterly alien to the place you’re from, and everything you know and were taught in life.
And you could move to the other side of the world when you come of age and never look back, and still the place and circumstances of your origin can, and probably will, guide you until the day you die.
Finding your own Home goes deeper than resonance with the aesthetics or dreams of a perfect and blissful lifestyle; utopian dreams of growing vegetables in a sunny garden, enjoying long lunches on cobblestone alleys and never having to work or stress about anything, life in an idyllic spiritually Mediterranean existence from a postcard or a renaissance daydream. If Home were where the want is, then no-one would be drawn to the rain and the drizzle, the in-fighting and the inbreeding and the slander and the famishing blight on the crops.
But they are.
Many would say that lasting relationships are the product of work, not romance. And the infatuation of romance often comes from novelty. I experienced this first hand in the places I chose and tried to make my homes. Japan allured me from afar with its novelty, its gorgeous aesthetics, its classical homeliness and tradition. But it didn’t quite work out for me, it’s rhythms too airtight for me to align with, and maybe more relevant: my own attachment to the place of my birth too strong for me to sever completely. With Vietnam I found myself in an arranged marriage with of sorts. But through hard work and sacrifice of the heart we made it work. When it came time for me to leave, it was part of me, and I was so in tune with its ways, its airs, its atmosphere, its habits, that it seems to have left an indelible mark on me, and the rhythm in which I move through the world, that is still revealing itself to this day.
And what of the return to the place that you are from, the place from which you left in the first place? All journeys must come full circle.
To return Home is not to seek perfection, but to accept what is. It is neither a return to the womb nor an endeavour to be accepted into the utopia you once believed it to be, but thought you were not fit to be a part of.
Home is a stable place in which you are free to be yourself. In integrating yourself, you have accepted this same principle in yourself – you are no longer either hyper-conscious or unconscious of your flaws, or your ups and your downs, the subtleties of your own rhythms. You are aware of them and accept them as a part of you, and flow with them effortlessly.
You don’t always choose your Home; for better or worse, for richer or poorer, til death do you part.
The place that you call Home then, is the place which matches your own energy, it is one that matches the rhythms of your own soul.
We should not strive to live in a utopia. To counter Groucho Marx: I’d rather live in a place that would have the likes of me, than to strive to fit into some ideal of perfection, a stuffy country club where everyone is adopting a persona to fit in with the ideal.
Each generation has always had its share of wistful young innocents who want to ‘Return’ to a time and tradition from long before they were born (The Retvrn to Tradition crowd is a fairly prominent, and misguided, internet subculture, made up, you’d have to presume, of people who wouldn’t survive 24 hours ‘living off the land’ pre-1960). The desire to ‘go back’ is one which manifests itself to the traveller in a longing to return to the places in which an ideal of blissful nostalgia and rose-tinted sunglasses have permeated the psyche. This is, of course, something I’ve experienced quite often over the years, and in dabbling with returning to places from the past I’ve been aware that perhaps it’s best not to mess with time travel, travelling through space being part of a continuum, and serving as a psychological and spiritual proxy for it.
Our Jungian podcast hosts raise the idea that the longing to ‘go back’ – a form of nostalgia – represents a sort of ‘death wish’: it is an acceptance of the younger state as being the image of perfection, and one which can never be matched in the future.
But we can match it, and it is our goal to do so. And most often the place we must match the idealism of those places from our past is right back where we started – the journey must take us Home.
At its fundamental root, the ‘return Home’ of life is a journey towards wholeness, whatever that might look like to you. And wanting to return home is wanting to return (whether one’s childhood or a place from your past, a place you made a temporary Home for yourself, such as college, a particular period in a particular city or a time spent abroad) or maybe experience for the first time – a feeling of wholeness in oneself.
I’ll finish with my favourite quote from John O’Donohue, the one which first alerted me to his existence and work some years ago:
“Each one of us is alone in the world. It takes great courage to meet the full force of your aloneness. Most of the activity in society is subconsciously designed to quell the voice crying in the wilderness within you.
The mystic Thomas a Kempis said that when you go out into the world you return having lost some of yourself. Until you learn to inhabit your aloneness, the lonely distraction and noise of society will seduce you into a false belonging where you will only become empty and weary.
When you face your aloneness, something begins to happen. Gradually, the sense of bleakness changes into a sense of true belonging. This is a slow and open-ended transition but it is utterly vital in order to come into rhythm with your own individuality.
In a sense this is the endless task of finding your true home within your life. It is not narcissistic; for as soon as you rest in the house of your own heart, doors and windows being to open outwards to the world.
No longer on the run from others, your connections with others become real and creative (emphasis my own). You no longer need to covertly scrape affirmation from others or from projects outside yourself. This is slow work; it takes years to bring your mind home.”
Faced with the ‘false belonging’ of culture and society, there is a part of us that never belongs anywhere, and that it is part of life that we must come to recognise this and learn to surf the waves of the world knowing that it’s only us who can steady ourselves entirely against them; this is the process of unlocking the true extent of one’s individuality, what Jung called Individuation. The false belonging of the world – of anywhere in the world – will exhaust us and empty us if we give ourselves too much over to it.
The cycle of longing and belonging continues as such: we long for human connection, but when we go out into the world to find it we find ourselves seduced by the false belonging of society; it is only by returning to ourselves that we replenish our spirits, but in becoming whole again, we reclaim our humanity – which of course, in turn inspires us to go out and seek connection with others once more, the foundation of our humanity.
On this note of creativity, O’Donohue further expresses:
“A true sense of belonging should allow us to become free and creative”, and
“You need to settle and belong in order to achieve any peace of heart and creativity of imagination”.
So many people – myself, I would have to admit at this stage, included – have left their Homes in a conscious or unconscious attempt to unlock the latent creative spirits they knew on some level lay buried deep within themselves; to ignite some sort of artistic fire by venturing into the unknown, exposing themselves to chaos, novelty, and interesting experiences.
This is a necessary step for the artist, to walk towards a form of self-destruction, away from the rigid order of the culture in which they were raised, a structure which has to this point shaped what they know to be their Selves.
Though once the chaotic energy is unlocked, we need to return to a place of some sort of order so that we can make sense of this power in line with our own vision of the world. This place of order will be different for each and every one of us.
Home is not a particular place or time. It is any place where we feel ourselves, or maybe more strictly speaking, it is the feeling of being ourselves. This sense of Self is something innate and timeless, though we become shaped through experience and the conditioning of our lives, for better or worse. Rather than in the chaos of the unknown world, it is in inhabiting our natural rhythm that we truly find ourselves. Once we find our Home, we can learn to carry it through the world with us, all over the world – and even back to the place where we first started.
We are more free then to come and go from Home as we please, to ebb and flow from a place of order to chaos and back to order again, rooted in an internal wholeness which is less easily shaken by being away from a particular place.
Like Escher’s staircase, order leads to chaos leads to order again; it’s journeys all the way down.
And at the end of each one – we must return Home.
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Many points resonate: you embrace aloneness, but then you start to belong... 40 years in Russia, 20 years in Sydney, 5 years in Japan, last two are my Homes with Japan slowly approaching superior “this is it” ranking
That O'Donohue extract *really* resonates! I grew up moving countries every few years with my parents' work, and now I spend my life travelling solo. Home is where I sleep that night, but it's also all the places I've left my heart along the way -- Hoi An, Shinjuku, Florence, CDMX... I'm at home both everywhere and nowhere, which is incredibly liberating. And it's never lonely, because I'm always with me. Thanks for all your lovely writing, I can't tell you how much I look forward to your updates!