Home Life: A First Introduction
Home is life. And it has six dimensions.
The following is cut and adapted from the beginnings of a book about home I started trying to write after my son was born. That was five years ago. Like Odysseus, I say home is what I’m navigating towards, but seem never to get to there, book-wise. But I still have hope that this unforeseeably roundabout route will deliver me there one day, and believe my arrival will be all the richer for everything I’ve encountered along the way. In the meantime, it makes sense to share some of the ideas, and see how they might be strengthened.
My entire focus recalibrated around the tiny new heart beating away inside me. I have chosen to have this baby, and I owe him the best possible start in life that I am capable of giving him.
I tried to fathom what that might look like. Of course, I knew a lot of what would happen in our son’s life would be beyond our control - up to him, up to history, to chance. But there were a lot of factors we would have a say in. Certainly, at the start. What kind of food would he eat? What songs and stories would he learn, and in what languages? What kind of buildings, in which cities, would he live in? Which landscapes and animals would feel familiar? What kind of schooling would he have? What kind of manners and values and sense of humour, would he acquire?
As I pondered these many questions, I began to realise that they were all just pieces of one bigger, core question; what kind of home would my child have?
It was only then I realised that, in spite of several decades of living, and multiple degrees in social sciences, I’d never though about the concept of ‘home’ in a really serious way. Hadn’t wanted to. Had been allowed not to. Indeed, I’d grown up in the first generation of American girls to be told we were supposed to focus only on our education and careers; thinking about home, or home-making, or having a family was portrayed as lame across all media, and looked upon as the equivalent of failure by our elders.
My own teenage home life was a stressful one that I was glad to leave for university. Which is perhaps why I didn’t mind or even notice that in all the women’s studies classes I took there, we really only discussed home as a place women needed to escape. As though you could just leave one home, without making a new one - as though home was something it was possible to opt out of altogether.
It took my body literally becoming somebody else’s home to realise that home was no longer something I could keep trying to run away from; it was something I was, and had to learn to build. And I couldn’t think well about what kind of home my son would have, until I’d asked a more fundamental question. Maybe the fundamental question:
What is home?
It sounds like a really simple question, doesn’t it? But if I ask you to tell me what home is, what would you say? What or where or whom or when would you be thinking of when you gave your answer? It might be wherever your parents live, or your spouse, or your kids, or your pets. It might mean a particular neighbourhood, or a particular hilltop. You might name a whole country, or just one village. You might associate home with a lively atmosphere, or a peaceful one, or a terrifying one. You might associate it with certain smells or songs. You might recall a garden, a meal, or a car. You might think of your ‘true’ home as the place you hope your soul will go when you die, or a land your ancestors migrated from before you were born. Your thoughts might fill you with joy, or panic, or remorse. They might leave you feeling inexplicably numb, or wanting to intentionally numb yourself. You mightn’t feel truly at home anywhere, or with anyone, but even still, you’ll have feelings and wishes around the idea of home. What I can guess with confidence is that these thoughts and wishes are unique to you, and powerful. Because home means something different to each of us, and it means a great deal. It sits at the very core of everything we are and do, from our gestation onwards.
If I was to summarise my own thoughts and feelings around what home has been, for me, the word I would have to use is scattered. The list of names of people and places my heart calls out at the thought of home is scattered all over the world. I grew up in Alaska, and in many ways, it is still my default idea of what the world should be like (wet, mountainous, formidable, quiet, staggeringly beautiful, full of bears). But I haven’t lived in that homeland in over twenty years. So it is my home, and also not my home. My mother recently moved to a town near Seattle. And wherever she goes becomes the place I go to ‘go home’ for a visit. But I’ve never lived there. I’ve lived in many other cities; San Francisco, London, Dublin, Singapore, Berlin… I don’t think I could count, and certainly couldn’t name, all the streets I have lived on, or the housemates and neighbours I shared them with. Nor all the friends I have made and lost in all this wandering. I have dropped bits of my heart like breadcrumbs, or Google map pins, all along the way, and now home has ceased to be a specific spot I can ever be in all at once.
So much of what propelled me through all these settings was curiosity; a palpable awareness that there was so much world to see. But it was also a feeling of alienation. Better to be somewhere you have no reason to belong than somewhere you ought to belong, but don’t feel you do. Or so I thought at the time.
I held my huge belly, beside myself with desire to meet the new little person kicking and dreaming and growing within me. I didn’t want him to feel the way I had so often felt. Alone. Lost. Unneeded. Unlovable. What did I want him to feel?
I wanted him to feel, from the moment he arrived in this life, how much his arrival had been longed for, and that he belonged now that he was here. Unconditionally. That was what I most wished for Arlo, or for any other new earthling.
That’s what home is, I realised; the feeling of belonging with someone, somewhere, or something. And if, instead of securely belonging, you become separated or alienated from that creature, place, or thing, you feel it, terribly; you will be longing for it.
I thought about the sources of alienation and longing in my own life. In the lives of people I knew. I made my way through stacks and stacks of books, and large chunks of the internet. Tomes and essays and videos and podcasts about pregnancy, psychology, biology, animal welfare, technology, family, culture, ecology, mythology, religion, architecture, history. I filtered every word of through the lens of ‘home’. And I came up with six requirements. Six nested realms in which a person needs to feel at home in order to feel fully at home in this life:
The first realm is the body. Each one of our lives begins and ends with our body. It’s the one place we have to live in, inescapably, until we die. (Indeed, leaving our body is death.) So how at home we feel in our lives is hugely dependent on how at home we feel in our own skin. That should be obvious, but we chronically underestimate, pathologise, and disassociate from our bodies - perhaps more radically now than ever. Given the pain, diseases, parasites, excretions, atrophy, and other problems the human body is subject to just in the course of its usual life cycle, it’s understandable that we might feel squeamish, and wish for a bit of distance. But distance becomes denial, which becomes dysphoria. Which makes it impossible to value and enjoy our bodies for the evolutionary wonders they are, or to tend them with proper care, and instead allows for exploitation and commodification of our very selves. And we are left alienated not only from ourselves, but from our fellow animals and ancestors.
The second realm is family. Not one of us comes into this world without taking colossal physical resources from our mothers’ bodies to build our own. But the near-death experience of birth is only the very beginning of what we demand from others. Each one of us began as a baby, unable to lift our own head for many months, or wipe our own arse for years (a situation we may return to in subsequent decades). It takes a frankly shocking amount of work just to keep an infant alive, and a Herculean effort to enable a child to thrive. The people tasked with the majority of this care are our family. They may or may not handle that task well. But whether we treasure our connections with our family of origin or find them unbearable, they are a huge and unshakeable part of how we seek out and make homes for ourselves throughout our lives. And the homes that each of us make all play their small part in how our species evolves onwards into the future.
The third is shelter. There isn’t a single one of us that doesn’t need to lay our body down to rest within some kind of shelter that can offer protection from storms and predators. A space where we can attend to ourselves and our loved ones. These days the word home tends to be used in terms of housing, and the discussion tends to focus on the so-called housing market. As though having somewhere to live was merely a consumer good, rather than a primary necessity that our entire physical safety and emotional wellbeing depends upon. If you aren’t able to access to decent housing, or aren’t safe in the housing you have, or are constantly worried about losing it, you can’t ever truly relax, and can’t possibly feel that you really belong in the society and place you are in.
The forth is land. That shelter has to rest on some patch of land or another. Humans have adapted themselves to nearly every place on Earth, and we have tried to reshape the Earth to our human desires. We’re working on colonising other planets, too. But surviving in a place isn’t the same as belonging to it; these days you can survive in a place without knowing or relating to it in any meaningful way. Indeed, innovations in transportation, food production, and thermostats make it pretty easy for a lot of us to move through our days with very little thought about the ground beneath our feet or the flora, fauna, and aquifers that exist there (or used to). Yet the kind of climate and habitat we find ourselves in influences our lives in so many ways: the quality of the water and soil, the clothing and shelter that is sensible for us to have, the sorts of fuel we burn, the flavours of food available freshly, the kinds of diseases and parasites and carcinogens we’re likely to be exposed to. And how connected we feel to our particular patch of the planet, and the local non-human inhabitants, has a huge impact on how we understand and care about the planet as a whole.
The fifth realm is community. Usually, community has meant the people who share a common location. They might collect in tribes, towns, schools, clubs, companies, battalions, or congregations. Recently, and increasingly, people are trying to assemble communities virtually, and globally. Communities create conversations, expectations, and laws. These shape our ideas about morality, justice, and beauty. What makes a good life, which achievements merit status, what balance to strike between individual liberties and social coherence. What to teach young people, and how to allocate resources. What you might like to think are your personal ideas around what is desirable, acceptable, or even possible, actually depends quite a lot on what communities you find yourself immersed in.
Lastly, we need to have some sense of where we belong in the cosmos. In the hierarchy of home needs, the universe is the least urgent for short-term survival. But it should not for a minute been regarded as expendable. We know that our planet is a little blue orb floating in an incomprehensibly vast expanse of darkness and stardust. But we need more details than that. Our spiritual and scientific ideas about our place in this universe are at the heart of how we understand our existence; the stories we tell about what life is and how to live it, and whether or not we feel our lives have meaning. And this feeds back into how we navigate all the other realms of home.
So there is a rough sketch of how I came to my conception of what home is, and its six core components. Body, family, shelter, land, community, cosmos. Though I am sometimes daunted by the prospect of writing about them comprehensively, I am confident that I have identified them correctly. I can envision them, all orbiting our core sentience in concentric circles, at all times, like planets around the sun. I intend to explore them more on here, so if you are interested, please subscribe. And please share it with anyone you know who might be searching for a greater sense of home themselves (which is all of us, I believe). Both are entirely free.
Is there not a realm between community and cosmos called "society"?