Home
I’m trying to figure out what home means.
In September, I’m taking a roadtrip home. I’ll be traveling from the high desert of New Mexico to the east coast of Pennsylvania.
East Lansdowne, outside of Philadelphia, is the place that bad things happened to the little children who live inside of me. When I walk around my old haunts, I feel curiosity and an odd kind of nostalgia. Is that home?
Lansdowne-Aldan High School — we’re having our 60th reunion! — is the place where I was too afraid to have friends. Since I started attending reunions, I’ve discovered the high school friends I never had. Is that home?
Quakertown is the place where my family fell apart and I decomposed. Today I remember the good parts of this small town, the school I founded, the spiritual growth I experienced. Is that home?
Bethlehem is the place where I began to put myself together with the help of a wonderful therapist. I feel deep affection for this city that cradled my healing. Is that home?
Long Beach Island, on the Jersey coast, is the place where, every summer, I let the sea wash over my wounds. The ocean and the sky and the waves and the wind will never get old. Is that home?
Lancaster is the place where my spirit and body coalesced in the God who healed me. Seminary made space for the faith that upholds me. Is that home?
It looks like this trip will be a nostalgia tour. Rather than wanting to avoid the places that held my pain, I seem to be attracted to them. I’m coming home in victory because none of it can hurt me anymore. They say that home is where the heart is and a piece of my heart is in all of these place.
In my new workbook that will be released in January — Healing Without Forgiving: A Hero’s Journey for Dissociative Survivors — I use the archetypal mythic adventure to describe the work we do to heal. At the end of the arduous journey, we come home — alive and whole — with new wisdom and insight to face the future. Home, in fact, is not a place but rather a state of being where our past is integrated with our present in a peaceful, coherent way.
Actually, my physical home is in New Mexico. Thanks to my long life and hard work, I am now happy and free. That is, indeed, home. Care to join me?
What does home mean to you? Is it a place or is it a matter of your heart? Does it make you happy or sad or some other feeling? If you’re not home, how will you get there? If you are home, describe it.
Send me your ideas about home by clicking here and I’ll share them in my next blog post. As community, we learn from each other!
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Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
~ James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
Lyn