Claudia Dommaschk asks a good question. What Is Home? And she suggests that perhaps a sense of home feels increasingly out of reach.
The idea of home once meant place, geography, familiarity, and most importantly, belonging.
Soon after high school I left my home in Nova Scotia and moved to Alberta. I quickly adjusted and felt at home there. On every trip back to NS I realized that I preferred the dry prairie air and big sky over the humidity and fog I grew up with.
I felt at home living in Calgary in spite of the dominance of the oil and gas industry. I was well connected in a vibrant nonprofit sector. We had a strong sense of community within the larger community.
In 2006 Pat and I used our vacation time to check out Mexico as a possible retirement distination. We soon felt comfortable in Ajijic with its large expat population. We let our enthusiasm cool for a couple of years and returned in 2008. And again, it felt like a good place to make a home. On our third trip in 2011 I felt more at home in Ajijic than in Calgary and we moved here in 2012.
My sense of home shifted significantly in 2020 during the early months of the pandemic. Soon I was meeting people all over the world on Zoom. A sense of belonging became less attached to where I was domiciled.
Claudia writes,
But now, even in the United States, where geographic stability was once reliable, we are being called to reckon with the unraveling of place.
I doubt that I would feel comfortable living in Alberta today.
What happens when your place no longer holds the space for your future?
Well, I have some ideas that I am playing with.
What is home?
Perhaps it is no longer just a location. Perhaps it is a resonance, an aliveness between people and place, between body and spirit, between what matters and what endures. Maybe home is not where we are, but how we are with one another. In this sense, home is relational. It’s built in presence. It lives in attunement. And it thrives in spaces that can hold us, truly hold us, in all our complexity.
Based on what I have experienced and what I have learned from Claudia, I think we can build more online spaces that feel ALIVE. “This journey is not easy. But it may be necessary.”
I very much enjoyed this as some sort of "opening salvo" in a conversation on "what is home?"
And as much as I agree with everything you said (wrote), I also sense that, deep down, feeling home -- and the experience of safety on an embodied level that comes with it -- requires some amount of "graspability" of the people we are "at home" with.
It will be fascinating to see how people I know will navigate this (current and maybe temporary) chasm between virtual meeting places (zoom calls) and what I still perceive as a lack of "material resource security" we can (and maybe want to?) provide for one another.
If I imagine being close to (or having reached) retirement age, some -- if not all -- of the capability of securing my economic safety will fall onto other people. And as much as I would still enjoy counting on "retirement payments" coming out of transfer income, I sense that unless we re-establish a much broader trust with and into our societal institutions, this will all evaporate before my eyes.
And then what? Well, I suspect that learning to live with (far) less comfort and luxury is a good start, but it still won't be enough. My hunch is that I want to find people with whom it is at least reasonably possible to share economic resources. How that will exactly look like is probably anyone's guess at the moment. Some resources do seem to be physically (and geographically) bound, but maybe we will find ways of sharing economic resources "in the cloud"...?
Anyway, as I said, good opening for a longer conversation! :)
I'm so glad my article resonated with you, John. One dimension of home that I didn’t fully explore, but feels important to name, is support. Some people have cultivated a deep sense of home within themselves but struggle to find it in relationship with others. Others feel at home only in the presence of community, yet remain estranged from their own inner life. Ideally, we need both: the grounding of inner support and the nourishment of outer connection. Home, in its fullest sense, is not just a place or a feeling; it’s a dynamic balance between solitude and belonging. In other words, between being with ourselves and being with others.