Are You "Home?"

leamclees
Nov 18, 2016
2 min read

Home.

On this, one of the busiest travel weekends of the year, questions about home abound. Where is it, and how long ’til we get there? Are we traveling toward it, or away from it? Is it a place, a person, a group of people?

As I departed wonderful Thanksgiving celebrations with friends a couple of years ago, Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Almost Home” began playing on my car radio. In part because of the evening’s dear company, laughter, and stories, Chapin Carpenter’s words meant something new to me that night: Maybe home isn’t so much a place as it is a feeling. Maybe “home” is ease, peace, doing what we feel we’re meant to do, and honoring our own value and worth in the world. Perhaps, just perhaps, home is courage — to be who we are, and to create the physical, mental, and emotional spaces that allow us to feel “home” in our hearts.

Getting “home” isn’t just connecting; sometimes it is, as Chapin Carpenter sings, letting go of what we have outgrown or what doesn’t meet our needs anymore — or what never really fit in the first place.

It’s probably not coincidence that, as I write this last paragraph, Stephanie Mills is suddenly belting out “Home” from the musical “The Wiz” on my stereo. The words she sings remind me that even when home is in our hearts, getting there is indeed the journey of a lifetime:

“And I’ve learned that we must look Inside our hearts to find A world full of love Like yours, like mine Like home …”