Home is where your heart is and not always where you lay your head. Home resides with the people entrusted with your heart, who happily welcome you and voluntarily (even eagerly) climb into your head. Homelessness is lonely, isolating and sad. Critics might say that having no place to call home is worse than the place you have not feeling like home. And we are all hopeful when we make our first home, aren’t we? It is an accomplishment to “finally have a home”. Once you have it, then you can settle in and get comfy. And do not forget, every home needs regular maintenance and care.
But sometimes we lose our homes. Just like with this economy, where so many people are upside down financially, there is an equivalent phenomenon for the heart. Sometimes the loss is slow to arrive and like the awful dread of waiting for the bank to finally processes the foreclosure, we know it’s coming. Sometimes, you lose a home in a flash. A fire consumes it. A rapidly rising river floods it and drags it away along with all your possessions. Sometimes, your home is invaded by thieves who ransack the place. And sometimes you just get a sense that someone has been inside your home. The mail on the table is not in the same place, a trinket is missing off the shelf, there is a boot print in the newly vacuumed living room carpet. Your skin prickles with the eerie knowledge that someone trespassed, lurked and remains hidden. Your home never feels quite the same again.
So, you have a garage sale and divest yourself of the unnecessary junk that accumulates but that you wish not to pack or move. You pack and move what’s left. You may not know where you’re going. You may not have a place to live. You may have to live somewhere temporarily and you cross your fingers that its not a bad neighborhood. This is terrain unknown for which there is no guidebook or GPS. The heart and its affairs are uncharted territory. We are all on maiden voyages to discover. Each morning brings something new. Each excursion offers possibilities. And one day….and it will happen for the world is round …..you will see a shimmer in the distance. You call out, “Land Ho!” and know that you approach your new home. The land is foreign, the natives may be unfriendly, so much of what you once knew may be useless but…..land and the possibility of a home is far, far, far better than forever at sea, unanchor and untethered.
And just the sight of land brings my heart joy because, while this journey was necessary, I am ready to be on solid ground once again. And I am full of dreams and hopefulness about a new home and all the ways in which home manifests.