a home by any other name

“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.”
― George Augustus Moore

Thanks, George -- and needless to say, the same can be true of a woman. That's where I find myself, in between the searching and the finding. The concept of home has been on my mind for all these months, struggling to settle in to a sense of place here in Nelson. I realize that home is an entirely subjective concept, different for each person, and changeable, too, given the time in one's life and the circumstances. 

I don't have digital pictures of all the places I've called home, and though they live on in my memory, I feel the need to relive those times, and those places, in other ways, here. 

Home can be a sense of community, it can be a combination of smells, it can be a pinpoint on a map. It is and can be so many more things, and I am deeply interested in hearing about as many concepts of home as I can. 

It's a new project I've decided to take on -- naturally, started before the last one is finished -- and I hope to reach out to as many people as possible. Please, if you're reading this, give a few minutes' thought to your ideas about home, and where you've felt it most strongly in your life thus far.

I imagine stories told through words, images and art, history and science combined, into a research project that will combine my interests in psychology, writing, and travel -- and being conducted on a parallel track to my own process of settling in to a home here in the Kootenays. A home for now, of course, because isn't that all we ever have?

A portable, pass-through kind of home: The World Is Your Backyard

"Happiness is home. And home is not a house - home is a mythological conceit. It is a state of mind. A place of communion and unconditional love. It is where, when you cross its threshold, you finally feel at peace.”

― Dennis Lehane

The making of our yurt-home in Blockhouse, Nova Scotia

“I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.” 

― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

Interior BC fog: a home wrapped in clouds

Home is a beloved baby: with Nesta in 2003

“Home wasn't a set house, or a single town on a map. It was wherever the people who loved you were, whenever you were together. Not a place, but a moment, and then another, building on each other like bricks to create a solid shelter that you take with you for your entire life, wherever you may go.” 

― Sarah Dessen

Home is funky art on display

 "We shape our dwellings, and afterwards our dwellings shape us."

- Winston Churchill

Home is friends, farms, fruit (Lunenburg County, 2011)

At home on the water (2008)

"Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration."

- Charles Dickens

Home: where clouds, mountains and water meet (from Langdale ferry, Sunshine Coast)

"One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time."

- Hermann Hesse 

Our home, Wilson Creek, BC -- 2007

"The worst feeling in the world is the homesickness that comes over a man occasionally when he is at home."

Edgar Watson Howe

Can home be a place you've not yet been?
(Thanks, Michelle, for the gorgeous photo taken in Brittany, France)

"Home should be an oratorio of the memory, singing to all our after life melodies and harmonies of old remembered joy."

- Henry Ward Beecher

Home can be big arms and warm heads

Home can never be expressed,

Till the soul has found its rest.

Home is transient here below,

And its term we cannot know:

It is like the sun's last ray,

Dying with departing day.

Home is like the robin's nest,

Now in downy feathers drest,

But tomorrow nowhere found,

In the air or on the ground.

- Jessee H. Butler, "Home"

To feel at home when only a path leads you there, faint footsteps to follow...
Paddy in Australia, 1976

Some goofs can be at home anywhere!

Home to growing minds and hearts, Blockhouse, NS

Three generations of Cornells...four if you count the picture of Paula!

Is it any wonder the last four pictures are of Nova Scotia?
(Sometimes you need to leave a place to feel at home there.)

"Home is that place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."

- Robert Frost

Home is an ongoing process, a shapeshifting definition, an elusive place to be created and re-created many times. Like a ball of clay, perhaps, that can be shaped, can hold its form for a time, and can be gently folded in on itself to be built up again. The clay remembers the form, as do our hands.

Happy homebuilding to you all.