My recent trip home, and yet not feeling quite “at home” in places I’d once called home, left me wondering about the nature of home. The MS Word program on which I’m writing this tells me that I am “home,” at least that’s the tab that’s open. Since we live so much on our phones these days, I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense that to navigate to the main menu I need to press the “home” button. Clearly, this is not the sense of home I’m looking for. Neither is the legal definition of home – more appropriately called one’s “domicile” or “residence” – which, ironically, is defined by one’s absence – the place to which one would return upon leaving. It’s the place where I vote, have my driver’s license, file taxes, can pay in-state tuition at public universities -- my official “permanent address.” Certainly, home is more than an address, or a physical structure. A house does not make a home.
Or does it? I imagine the hundreds in this city, the thousands and millions around the world, who are unhoused, who might very well be glad to call a house a home – to know the relief of “being home” in the shelter of a physical abode, of knowing with certainty where they will sleep that night and the next and the next, where they will find some measure of physical security, protection from the elements, a place to go the bathroom, get clean, have access to water and ways to cook food, privacy, rest. Perhaps it is the fact that I take of all of these things for granted that enables me to ponder other meanings of “home.”
I have made various physical structures – from dorm rooms to apartments, offices, and houses – “home” by decorating them to my taste, filling them with photos, plants, books, posters and other artwork, rugs, lamps, mugs and tea, music, the occasional stone, a braid of sweetgrass. Other places I have dwelled – boarding houses, hospital rooms, friends’ spare rooms and couches – have given me shelter, even food and care, but not a sense of home. Do the things we surround ourselves with make a home? I’ve often thought a house is not a home without a piano, books, and a dog. (I always envied my music colleagues’ office spaces at the university because they were able to have pianos.) I’m lucky to have all three. Yet while these certainly can make a place “homey,” I suspect they are the surface elements of home.
The sense of home goes deeper. My friend, ecofeminist Greta Gaard has written that “home” “implies an intimacy, a kind of knowledge of place, a set of relationships and commitments.”[1] As such it requires a certain longevity, as well as a commitment to knowing the place and the people. In that sense, my childhood home was home to me, so interwoven as it was with deep knowledge of the woods, the lake, the fields, the places of community – there wasn’t a street there I hadn’t walked. My family’s lives were intertwined with those of our neighbors, the school, and the church in multiple ways.
The same is true of the lake in Michigan where my family vacationed and eventually bought a cabin. I have paddled and sailed and swum in its waters; its hills cradle my soul. I know where each plant and flower will bloom in its season, where the berries grow, and the mushrooms. My sense of intimacy extends to the beeches, cedars, maidenhair ferns, and mosses. I can spot a Petoskey stone from just the smallest glimpse of its surface. I’ve known the people there since I was a girl. Not much in life can compare with friendships of over sixty years.
I’ve made Duluth my home now for over forty years, and it is a making in the way that Greta describes – of taking the time to know intimately the rocks and waterfalls, the way a stream travels and changes with heavy rains, the shifting shape of the sand beach, the places where the bloodroot and ladyslippers bloom, the maples and oaks as they are just beginning their lives and the birches as they are ending theirs, the ladybug hatches, the deer paths, the beaver dams –and of being committed to their well-being.
It is a making of relationship with the people as well -- the friendships, the work relationships, the volunteering and activism and creation of community; showing up – for the work, for the grief, for the celebrations. Commitment to place and to people is the work of making and shaping a home.
And yet, I’ve also felt “at home” in certain places at the first encounter, with no ties or former knowledge. The Welsh have a word for it – cynefin – what writer Pamela Petro describes as a sense of “belonging to a place you’ve never been to before.”[2] Indeed, it was in Wales that I felt that sense so strongly. It was as if the lyrics to the Welsh song were written for me:
This land of song will keep a welcome
And with a love that never fails
We'll kiss away each hour of hiraeth[3]
When you come home again to Wales
I can’t describe it any better than cynefin. Everything in Wales spoke to me, called to me. Was it the water, the beach, the mountains, the sheep, the clouds, the rocks, the music, the harps, the language, or the spirit of rebelliousness – Cymru Rhydd!/Free Wales!-- written in Welsh and English on the large jagged boulders I passed several times walking up and down the steep hill to the inn where I stayed? It was deeper, more mysterious than any of these – it was simply home. I belonged here. My soul belonged here.
I first experienced cynefin on the ancient rocks of Lake Superior on Isle Royale. My family had traveled there via the ferry from Copper Harbor when I was seven. I spent hours jumping from rock to rock on the shore and even at that young age I knew this was my place of belonging. So when I had the chance to return to Superior – Gichi Gami -- and make these rocks and water my home, I did. I moved to Duluth to come home. Every time I leave here and return, at the first glimpse of Superior I feel my soul release. Even now, whether sitting, standing, or leaping, I feel as if I was born of these rocks. The Anishinaabe call them grandfather rocks, but they feel more an ancient lineage of grandmothers to me, aligned heart to heart through rock to the heart of the earth.[4]
Sometimes it’s not so much a specific place as the elements of a place that feel like home – the springiness of a cedar swamp, the smell of sweetgrass in a meadow, the song of a peewee, the lapping of waves, the magic of snow-covered trees, or simply a quality of light. Our first home is the watery world of our mothers’ wombs and for some water continues to be home. I’ve rarely lived far from water, whether in lakes or streams, and the few times I have, have felt dry in my very core. Others feel most at home in the desert, or mountains, prairies, jungles, or cities. When I lived in Birmingham, England, I realized the homesickness I was feeling wasn’t for my Minnesota home or even for the States, but rather for forests and meadows. I rarely feel at home in cities and often feel most home in rural landscapes. Even returning to the one freeway and relatively small city of Duluth that I call home can feel jarring after spending a few days or weeks in the north woods or the farms, woods, and back roads of largely rural northern Michigan where I feel most at home.
But home is about more than place. It is also the people. As feminist theologian Maria Harris has said, “home is the place for entering community . . . not only as being-there, but also as being-with.”[5] I was born into family with whom I shared a home for many years and they are always entwined with my sense of home. Friends with whom I’ve shared intimate moments of life and birth, illness and death, tragedy and triumph, and the dailiness of life bring the comfort and familiarity of home. With them I dwell in what Maria Lugones described as “the world in which one is at ease” – where one is a fluent speaker, knows and agrees with the values and norms, has a shared history and the ability to be playful, and is humanly bonded – loving the people and being loved by them. And like cynefin is to place, sometimes being “at home” with someone is just an immediate sense. I knew from the outset that my relationship with my husband was right because he felt like home to me. I suspect my dog, Ben, feels the same about me since he melted into my arms the first time I held him and has barely left my side in the more than four years since.
Places, people – these elements of home reside outside of ourselves. Yet the sense of home that I’m after here is more of a “felt sense”[6] – an internal sense, whether of security or safety, of being centered, or settled, – or in the sense of “dwelling” – a place where we can linger long within ourselves. For many this sense can be elusive. In all my years of trauma training I’ve learned that feeling at home in one’s body can be a rare thing. Some people deal with trauma by dissociating – mentally escaping their bodies in order to survive. Our cerebral culture also takes us out of our bodies. We live so much in our heads, it can be difficult for people to know what they are feeling, and quickly shift their focus to what they are thinking. Being at home in one’s body can be particularly difficult for women in this culture which teaches us our bodies are impure, or the source of sin in the world, or mere objects for the male gaze, or as early feminist Sarah Grimké wrote in 1838, “regarded by men as pretty toys or as mere instruments of pleasure,”[7] or simply wrong.
I love the way young children are so comfortable in their bodies, with no degree of self-consciousness – something we tend to lose as we grow older. But we can regain our embodied selves. In its integration of body and spirit, embodiment is a quality of the soul. So, too, in its integration of place, relationships, self, body, and spirit, is home a quality of the soul. Home, writes Petro, is “a condition of the soul; a feeling; . . . a harmony with the season or with God or family or the rings of the self; . . . .“[8] We know it when we feel it.
Yet perhaps we best know what home is when we don’t feel at home where we are, when we experience what the Welsh describe as hierath – an awareness of not being at home, or what Petro describes as “an awareness of the presence of absence.”[9] For it is in experiencing hierath that we become acutely aware of what we long for -- “what place or with whom or under which conditions our souls feel at home.”[10]
Writer Pico Iyer likewise has said that home is “not so much a place of soil as a place of soul” -- “the place where you become yourself.” Better yet, home is the place where your true self is able to grow and flourish. In this sense, home is our “habitat” -- the place where the conditions for one’s life are most favorable for thriving. In her essay, “Homeplace,” bell hooks described how the homes made by Black women, in addition to being places of shelter, comfort, and the feeding of body and soul, were also places where “we learned dignity, integrity of being… where we could be affirmed in our minds and hearts, . . . where we could restore to ourselves the dignity denied us on the outside in the public world . . .[places]to grow and develop, to nurture our spirits. . . . where we can heal our wounds and become whole.”[11]
Whether with another or with ourselves, in a particular place, or as a condition of our lives, this -- the sense of being integral and whole, at one with ourselves – is home.
Sources
Gaard, Greta. The Nature of Home: Taking Root in a Place. Tucson: U. of Arizona Press, 2007.
Grimké, Sarah. Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and Other Essays. Bartlett, Elizabeth Ann, ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.
Harris, Maria. Dance of the Spirit: The Seven Steps of Women’s Spirituality, New York: Bantam, 1991.
hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1990.
Iyer, Pico. “Where Is Home.” TED talk. 2013.
Lugones, Maria C. 1990. “Playfulness, ‘World-Travelling,’ and Loving Perception.” In Anzaldúa, Gloria. Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. 390-403.
Petro, Pamela. The Long Field: Wales and the Presence of Absence, a Memoir. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2023.
[1] Gaard, The Nature of Home, 7.
[2] Petro, The Long Field, 70.
[3] I define the Welsh word hierath a bit later on.
[4] The last thing I remember before my cardiac arrest at the public hearing about turning that particular stretch of shoreline into a “safe harbor” was the two men in front of me muttering to each other that they didn’t see what the big deal was --they were just a bunch of rocks. “Just a bunch of rocks,” I wanted to say to them. “These are some of the oldest rocks on earth, ancient, wise, resilient, holders of deep memory and the story of the land. They deserve our reverence and respect.”
[5] Harris, Dance of the Spirit, 101.
[6] “Felt sense” is a term first used by psychiatrist Eugene Gendlin that refers to an internal bodily sense that can tune into with increased self-awareness.
[7] Grimké, Letters, 56-57.
[8] Petro, 302.
[9] Ibid., 294.
[10] Ibid., 316.
[11] hooks, Yearning, 41-42, 49.