My friend Patti Digh pointed me yesterday to an exercise proffered by Beth Patterson, to write an essay of no more than 750 words that answers the question: Where is home, to you?
I have written articles all around this question, from my long, ponderous article about The Importance of Place and my lament that we are all Homeless and Addicted, to my review of Melissa Holbrook Pierson's book The Place You Love is Gone ("we are a generation weighed down by a sadness we don't know we feel") and my more recent Big Question: Where Do I Belong?
Home is the place where you are yourself, the place you were meant to be who you were meant to be.
I
have often thought I knew where my home was. Places of shelter, wild
places, rainforests, warm, inviting places, places untouched by human
construction or alteration. Places that called to me, welcomed me,
enfolded me in their embrace. Places I just felt, instinctively, that I
belonged. That I was a part of, not apart from, connected to everything in that place and though it to all-life-on-Earth.
I
sympathize with the Procol Harum song whose protagonist sought to
explore the world but at every turn "only saw how far he was from
home". For some, the fearful, home is the only place we are not afraid.
While
I sense, instinctively, that the definition of home above, in italics,
is correct, I am still not quite sure what it means.
For most of
us, including me, I have never found a place where I am myself, perhaps
because I am not yet sure who that self is, or is meant to be. At least
not in the nobody-but-yourself ee cummings sense. I have argued that
the work we are meant to do is that which lies at the sweet spot where
your Gifts (what you do uniquely well), your Passions (what you love
doing) and your Purpose (what greatly needs doing, that you care to do)
intersect. I have called such work Natural Enterprise and although it
is rare it is magic.
Perhaps, by analogy, home, the place we are
meant to be, lies at the sweet spot where our Capacities (what we offer
to place and community, what we are good at being), our Joys (what fills us with love and happiness in a place and community, what we love being), and our Intention (what we need ourselves to be, and others need us to be). That is, perhaps, our place -- not our place to do, but our place to be, the place where we be-long. When we have found our place, is that place our home, our Natural Community?
The challenge here is not only discovering such a place in this staggeringly complex world, it's knowing ourselves
-- most of us, I suspect, don't really know our capacities, what we're
capable of, or what we really love being, if we've only experienced
being a few different things in a few different places. We probably
don't know what we need ourselves to be, unless we've been really
tested, and what others need us to be depends on their own
ever-changing circumstances, and how those many 'others' revolve, as
they will, in and out of our lives.
I wonder if this challenge
is not due, for the most part, to having so many choices. In indigenous
communities, and among wild creatures, there are fewer different
capacities that can be developed, fewer capacities in demand, fewer
different ways to find love and fewer people to find it with. There is
less opportunity to visit or learn about other places, so one's search
is limited to what is at hand or described by those one encounters
personally. And there is more time to reflect, to ponder one's options,
to learn who one really is, and less cultural indoctrination (necessary
in modern civilization to keep us in order in our horrifically
overcrowded world) to become everybody-else.
We have become so used to defining ourselves by what we do, that we often cease to distinguish that from who we are.
My Gifts include imagining and provoking; that is what I do uniquely well. But what am I uniquely good at being? What reflective (as opposed to active) capacity defines me, comprises my unique offering to my place, wherever that may be?
My Passions include writing and working collaboratively on complex problems; these are things I love doing. But what do I most love being, that might help me identify my place, the place where I can be this?
My Purpose, what I am needed to do,
is to enable people to change themselves for the better. But what do
people (people in my community, people I love) need me to be? And how can I be more completely and authentically nobody-but-myself?
Home
is the place that realizes these three 'existentials': It is where one
can be what one is good at being, where one can be what one loves
being, and where one can be what one is needed to be. The ducklings in
the photo above, studied so carefully by biologist Bernd Heinrich, will
know their home instinctively, even though it will change (from wetland
to meadow to tundra, in cycles) many times throughout their lives. Each
time they will migrate home as precisely and unhesitantly as a guided
missile. They know where is home, for them.
For
us, discovery of home is harder. It requires us to know who we are.
When we became disconnected from all-life-on-Earth, and preoccupied
with what we had to do, and began living inside our heads, we forgot who we were. Until we remember, we will never know where is home, for us.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
