In honour of today, June 18: exactly one month before I return home(?)
From The Art of Coming Home, suggested reading from MCC:
Usual definition of HOME: "the place where you are known and trusted and where you know and trust others; where you are accepted, understood, indulged and forgiven; a place of rituals and routine interactions, of entirely predictable events and people and very few surprises; the place where you belong and feel safe and secure and where you can accordingly trust your instincts, relax and be yourself" (15).
However, this is a very high standard, "a standard, in fact, that any such place cannot possibly meet. As you will see, this very realization, that home is not really home, is at the core of the experience of re-entry" (16).
Oh dear.
...a year in Hanoi with MCC's SALT program
2 comments:
Dear Rosie - That's a beautiful definition, but as I think about all the places that I've called home, none of them fit the bill entirely. Nowhere are you going to find life that is full of "entirely predictable events and people and very few surprises." Life "at home" can be just as disorienting as life abroad. An interesting thing that I've found is that you can approach your life in a familiar setting as if it were a foreign country. For example, I'm living with 2 engineers this term, and I often feel like hanging out with them and their friends is a cultural experience, and one that I'm not always entirely comfortable with. It can be amazing what surprises you will find in life that you thought you knew. It doesn't take much. So I think that in the same way that no place is ever completely home, I think that you can also make a home wherever you go. I think of often as a child when I would travel with my family and refer to the place we were staying that night as "home." For me when I was younger, home was where my family was, wherever that happened to be. I still kind of feel the same way - home is where I feel loved and supported, and where I can thrive. That can happen in many different places. So I just want to assure you that you do have a home to come "back" to at 142 Erb St W in Waterloo. I know it's just one of several homes that you have, but it's here and we're looking forward to having you.
Much love.
"I think of often as a child when I would travel with my family and refer to the place we were staying that night as "home." For me when I was younger, home was where my family was, wherever that happened to be. I still kind of feel the same way - home is where I feel loved and supported, and where I can thrive."
Amen, thats so true, Mimi. I think its beautiful because the more places you go and the more people you get to know, the more homes you have. You will never (and should never) be completely comfortable in any home (on earth). Having experiences such as these help us to immediately have a certain level of comfort wherever we go.
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