Saturday, January 4, 2014

No place like...

We resumed our weekly Friday seminars yesterday after a few weeks of holiday vacation. In case I haven't explained it already, seminar is an integral educational component of the intern program. We take Friday mornings off work to explore a topic or context that is relevant to our lives and work here in DC. Sometimes we go on field trips, and sometimes we have guest speakers, but this week we stayed in (it was pretty cold outside, after all) for some quiet reflection. The topic of reflection:

Home.

Coincidentally, this has been on my mind a lot recently anyway. I've been uprooted for a while now -- it's been seven years since I really lived in my hometown, and Williamsburg is now home to a new cycle of students. In the years that have followed graduation from college, I can name four different living situations. Now I've landed here, where I've been in the process of building a life and community for almost exactly four months. With the nucleus of my life moving so fluidly from one place to the next, and knowing that I still have a few years before I get settled in any one place for an extended period of time, home has been an intriguing and elusive concept.

So I Googled it. How do people define home? This is what I found:

               Merriam-Webster - "Home: the place (such as a house or apartment) where a person lives, 
                  OR a family living together in one building, house, etc., OR a place where something normally or 
                  naturally lives or is located."
               The Apache Relay - "Home is not places -- it is love."
               Oliver Wendell Holmes - "Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our 
                  hearts."
               Robert Frost - "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."
               Emily Dickinson - "Where thou art, that is home." (note: this is seconded in paraphrase by 
                  Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros)
               William Jerome - "Any old place I can hang my hat is home sweet home to me."
               Jane Sherwood Ace - "Home wasn't built in a day."
               Maya Angelou - ""The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are 
                  and not be questioned."
               T.S. Eliot - "Home is where one starts from."
               Hermann Hesse - "One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole 
                  world looks like home for a time."

I took some comfort in realizing that I'm not the only one who struggles to pinpoint what, exactly, makes home home. Is it dependent upon the place itself, and to what extent? Is love the one defining factor? Or time? Or vulnerability? Can anywhere be home? Can you carry home with you?

Last year, I had this same conversation with a group of really great, thoughtful twentysomethings trying to figure out where our respective boats are anchored, if they're anchored at all. Looking at the above quotes in conjunction with that fruitful discussion and yesterday's reflections, it became evident that the difficulty in defining home is not because nobody really gets it -- it's because we have to figure out what it means for each of us. In the end, we each have our own criteria for what makes home. Some people are tied to home by a deep and true sense of place. Others say it's entirely dependent upon where their family is. Those who are married or about to get married have said that home is the life they share with their spouse or spouse-to-be, wherever that is. I haven't decided yet what it means for me. For now I make do with packing my sense of home on my back like a turtle until I figure it out, and that's just fine.

(Strawberries are a bonus.)

So what about you? What, for you, makes home?