Making Home

When you make a home, you fill it with the breathings of your heart.

When you make a home, you make it a haven, the place where you just be.

It’s not just the floor you walk on, the doors you close, the bed you sleep in, the table where you eat.

When you make a home, and when you really make a home, home really comes to mean something else entirely.

Home becomes the place your soul resides.

Home becomes a life meaning.

Home is what you take with you wherever you go.

Once I told my sister, when we were miles from home, walking down a city sidewalk, in a city neighborhood, that I thought perhaps I understood all the wanderers and the sailors, the explorers and the journeymen—the ones always with restlessness under their feet, always in need of a road ahead of them, home one day and gone with the sunrise the next. I thought perhaps I knew them now—being one of them myself, always afraid of the constant, slogging on day after day through the same mundane life. Always longing for a place unseen, a land unknown. Always longing to see the world anew.

Perhaps now, after the leaving of home and the living away and struggling hard with change, I understand:

It wasn’t so much the fear of a mundane, monotonous life that drove us away from home . . .

It was the fear of not loving home enough.

There’s a struggle in me against change. And a struggle in me with a need for change, and oh, the years it took to convince me that this was a gift.

There are souls that struggle for routine, for the day to day sameness. There are souls that struggle just to find a balance.

It’s the difference in people’s souls, no one difference better than another, no one difference more praiseworthy than the other, just the whole of our own beautiful souls that make us who we are, that make us all just one glorious union of human.

But there is one thing in me that never changes and is never struggled against.

Home.

I know of soul needs that are far different than mine, I know of soul needs that I struggle to understand.

But there is a constant here. In all the wild and different world where souls are shaped, there is one thing that is ever true, for all our souls.

The never ending need for Home.

And the shape your soul determines the shape of your home.

And there’s a real legitimate fear of forgetting how much you just really love being home. And it’s a fear we maybe shouldn’t ever get over. Because maybe no matter where we are in this world, we ought to carry home in our souls.

All those wanderers, maybe they knew what they had when they left home, and it wasn’t the search for another that took them away. Perhaps it was the longing for the reminder of where home was. And maybe it wasn’t so much what they were leaving, but what they carried away from it when they left.

Maybe they knew the better for all their wandering that home is not just a shelter you make from storms and torrents, a stronghold against beasts and tyrants. Maybe they knew home is what souls are made of. Home is the place you carry inside you wherever you go. Home is the thing you make out of your heart.

Home becomes the place where your soul resides because your soul is your home.

The wanderer and the “cricket on the hearth”, the traveler, the changer, the homebody, the settler, the king, and the quiet, we are all homemakers. No matter the road, no matter the place. Home comes from our souls and what we build in our souls is where we will build our homes.

I know there are places for our souls where the peace is immeasurable, the defenses unbreakable, and the goodness seaworthy and time tested, and I know there are some souls that long for such a place with such a peace where the wild world is shut out, and home can seem like such a place.

But where do these places come from if not from the soul? And how does the soul know how to build such a place if it had not been built there already?

All long for home.

All lose sight of it now and again.

All wander for a time, searching for it.

But it is what we always return to, home.