"Where are you from?"

Defining Home

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”

James Baldwin (Giovanni's Room)

Do you know where you belong? Is there a place on the map where you could stick a pin and say unequivocally, this is home? Is it a house? Is it a terrain? Maybe even a foreign country? Or is it the community of people with whom you feel most clearly yourself? Speaking as someone who has “lived around,” trekked around the USA from one coast to another, I can say I no longer know where that geographic location is. When I think of “home” I find that memories of people rise and fall in my head—sometimes, people who only inhabited my world for brief periods, but are clearly not forgotten. One of those is an old woman whose name I do not remember, but who grew a beautiful flower garden in front of her basement apartment. We lived in Chattanooga at that time. I was perhaps eight years old, and I wanted to take a flower to my teacher. Instead of asking, I stole an Indian Paintbrush, a red feathery bloom that was entirely exotic to me. I felt terrible guilt, but not enough to keep me from committing the crime. Sometime later, I passed the old woman working among her flowers, and she greeted me warmly. Then she did something she had never done before; she invited me to come and pick some flowers for my mother. I knew she had seen my treachery, and responded to it with love and generosity. That memory feels like home.

In his book, The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood, Hugo Hamilton wrote: “Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it's not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you've been to...” For sure, many of us feel displaced—many millions of us are, in fact, uprooted. I feel certain that homeless people and refugees find it difficult to identify home.

Perhaps, we can re-imagine what home is—not a place, but a people. Perhaps we are less like cattle, and more like turtles, who carry home on our backs and grow it as we go. Our tribe, changeable as it may be, is a living, breathing thing. Our place in it may be just as transitory, but nevertheless, filled with life. And it is that life, those connections and deep ties, that are our true home regardless of where we may be.

                                                              In the Spirit,

                                                                 Jane