Spirituality in Daily Life: a Sense of Home

Introduction

This post is about a sense of home, a fundamental aspect of human spirituality. This post begins with an exploration of the sense, or feeling of home as a lived experience which we all share. A second post will look at the object of this sense, home as a spiritual reality.

We begin in this case with the sense that I had coming home from All Saints Elementary to our little house nestled into a hillside in El Sereno. I’ll describe that sense of home in a way I hope you can relate to, different than me though you may be.

The Sense of Home as a Magical Place

When I’d spy our little house down the street, it would be cloaked in a homey feeling.

That feeling, that sense, filled me with a sense of magic and wonder. It turned a mere house into that very special place, home– a place that seemed somehow divine.

The Vivid Reality of Home

This feeling made home so vivid, that everything around it seemed somehow less real, less vivid, less intense. The trees out front seemed more tree-ish, the driveway more perfectly inviting, the front lawn just the right size and color– each little part vividly real and perfect. My home was technicolor, in a world of black and white.

A Christmas Tree with Presents

Some people I’ve met along the way, such as colleagues from my professional career, have been mystified when I try to describe “homeyness” to them. Isn’t it just, familiarity, they might say?

Well, does it help to describe, Christmas as a kid? That feeling of presents under the tree on Christmas morning, lights twinkling and blinking, silver tinsel shimmering. E, everyone you care about gathered ‘round giggling and laughing in soft pajamas and warm foot coverings? How this scene gave the house even more of this special feeling of home? That made the area around the tree seem to be the center of the house, and, even more vivid and real that the rest of home around it. As if home concentrated into the Christmas tree area?

Homey Christmas tree on Christmas eve, presents underneath, lights on.

By: Kgbo.

How about the feeling in the dining room, during a great birthday party? Or the feeling in the back of the station wagon crammed with your siblings, going on a family road trip?

A Sense of Nostalgia for Home

Years later, the magic abides. When fortune grants me the chance to pass by or through one of the places I’ve called home, that magic feeling washes over me again. That former home of mine leaps out as more real, more intense, more real than what’s around it. And I feel an impossible, powerful longing for something that’s there, but no longer is.

Nostalgia acquires its great power from the lingering magic of the vivid feeling of home. And of our abiding connection to that place.

A Sense of Home, Family, and Community

I’d look around at the other houses on my block, and could tell if they had more, or less homeyness of their own, belonging to other families. Yet that homey magic was in a way something special, specific, to me. And to my parents, brothers, sisters, uncles and aunts and grandparents. Home, family, and, if you are lucky enough to live in a place like I did, community, felt fused, connected, to a specific place that was my world.

Center of the World

Being home also gave me a strange, distinct, stabilizing sense of being at the center of the world. From this point I marked the direction to all other things.

Tabula Anemographica Nautica Compass Chart marking the mystical winds.
By: Matthäus Seuttetre (1678–1757).

To the west lay the great blue ocean, where from atop the round hill behind our house we could see a golden cresent of light when the sun set on the Pacific. That round, yellow hill watched over us from the east, over which the sun rose. The purple and blue, eternal San Gabriel mountains towered over the valleys to the north. To the south lay the much smaller valley that contained other little hills like ours, staring back at us with little houses along streets like ours.

Multiple Centers

I noticed that as we traveled together, the places we went all the time we’d pass our time would start to get something of that feeling, too, The Rosco five and dime, the Market Basket or the Second Street market, became part of home. We painted the world with this feeling as we went.

Though we moved often when we were kids– from the East LA neighborhood where my parents were from and where I spent formative years, to the foothills to the north, where my grandfather had gone in a desperate attempt to prolong the life of his wife, my grandmother, a little longer at the sanitarium there– any new home would acquire that feeling.

How different places can become home is easy to feel. But it is puzzling to think. The home is the center of the world– but the world, it seems, can have more than one center. It is almost as though in the single center to the world, there are concentric circles overlaid around that center, and you can travel away but then come back to the center moving in a straight line. We’ll come back to struggling with this strange idea, that the perfectly sensible feeling seems to bring along with it.

Parts of Home Have All of It, and Home Makes the Parts Whole

While at home, homeyness might fade into the background if I was busy playing some silly little game that took great concentration, like, catch the wooden ball on the string in the little cup. “Clop” sounds the success.

Tops, yo yos, ball-in-cup and other wood toys at the Traditional Toy Museum in the city of Aguascalientes, Mexico.

By: the Imadatter.

But even that sound was part of the homeyness of the home.

In fact, the darkened sarten in the kitchen, the comfy long brown sofa, the little rabbit-eared TV screen on which, through haze and fuzz and static we thought that all TVs had, we saw Neil Armstrong walk on the moon– each piece of home had that magic hanging off it, like a vapor. In fact, when this feeling would come to me at its most intense, it would seem that all of home, or the entire feeling of home, could be made to be present in a little part of it. You could take special things with you as you go, in your pocket, to take home with you.

Homey old time TV set, wood grained, picture tube.

By: Tomislav Medak.

And yet, when at home, home made each little thing that was inside, or just outside, into a single magical place, home.

Awakening a Sense of Home with Rituals- Or Not

When I moved away to college, and when I moved within college, homeyness came with me.

But only if I did as my parents suggested and “made each place a home” with little rituals of decoration, keeping plants, keeping things in order, bringing pictures or other momentos of home with me– and such. That would make those places seem more real, more vivid to me as well.

But if I did not do this, that sense of home, I began to realize, was something that could slip away.

Outside of Home: A Sense of Emptiness, and Loss of Meaning

Sometimes we can understand something better when we lose it; memory can then sharpen the impression when that which we treasure suddenly vanishes. (More on this general idea of how loss sharpens the perception of what is sacred, here.)

Later in life, places I might live or stay might never become homey– but what’s more, they would have a strange feeling of “not being home.” At first, I didn’t have the words to describe this. Something precious was slipping away but I knew not what.

Once I tried to explain it to my then-fiance. We were moving into two rental apartments up in what passed for foothills in Orange County, California. The slick complex had all the things you could want in an apartment paradise: a pool, a workout facility, walking paths, and so on. But that apartment lacked something that it would never acquire. I realized this as I drove up to it with all my stuff, to move in on the first day. It never had the magic feeling of being in the center of the world, in a special and divine and holy and somehow more real place.

Partly, this is because the complex was designed in what was then a new style, which is now commonplace: antiseptic, corporate, generic and neutral.

Homeyness thrives in the particular, the local, the specific. You can have a strong sense of home in any place in the world at all, in homes of all styles and designs– from the traditional Mexican home, to the a Victorian home, or even to a Romani varno. But it has to be specific, distinctive, concrete.

As the sense of home slipped away, what replaced it was a vague feeling of rootlessness, loss of meaning. Not only the place, but the things happening in it, didn’t mean as much, didn’t seem to be as real, didn’t seem to be attached to anything.

These feelings led to others that were more and more disturbing.

A Sense of Inquietude and Dissolving

When I began to lose my sense of home, of place, of community, I felt a growing sense of inquietude.

A growing existential unease; a vague, nameless anxiety.

As if the world itself is dissolving, and I’m dissolving along with it.

Restless Roaming

Then, I grew more and more restless, as I started to roam.

Part of this, in my generation at least, was forced upon us: to rise through the ranks in life, or even to keep one’s livelihood, more and more, one had to move from town to town, or from city to city, or even state to state. We call this “economic dynamism.”

Along with it, comes a certain tidal movement and restlessness. I submit part of this is a search for what was lost: feeling the loss of meaning, we begin to seek it; feeling a loss of reality, we want to find something real. Restless, we roam. Are in search of that elusive thing, home?

Then, the sense of something darker begins to grow.

A Sense of Chaos All Around — and Within

This sense of home decays. Inquietude and restlessness grows.

The God of Chaos, swirling wind body, stirring things up.
By: Humbert de Superville, David (1770-1849).

Our sense of inner and outer chaos grows, as well. We become aware that everywhere, people are seeking and roaming. Change is accelerating, destroying, upending, disordering the reality of the world.

In this kind of world, one can become possessed by the spirit of chaos itself.

Having for longer and longer periods lived, in places that are strange, unsettled, and chaotic, we ourselves begin to feel ourselves to be agents of that chaos, and destruction, and disorder.

Our own activity becomes increasingly chaotic, and frantic, and this searching becomes a habit. We are forever seeking change, novelty, movement, the latest thing, something new.

This is what I mean by, coming to identify with chaos, inside, as a value for oneself– in a manner of speaking, as it if Chaos itself, and not Home, were Divine.

Some of us begin to go on various kinds of manic journeys, or acquiring home after home after home, trying to bring that feeling of home back to life. We might obsess over expensive details in our house, meant to evoke that sense. This leads me to the idea of a fetish.

The Kitchen Fetish

Fancy Designer Kitchen, feels Homey, but is it?
By: Carolyn Christine.

I once read in the New Yorker, in an article now lost to me, about how then-ascendant Martha Stewart was a style master of the homey kitchen. People would obsessively pursue homeyness, in a room in which they rarely spend any time. Let alone cook! The kitchen as room had become a fetish, an object of unreasonable and excessive attention. I would submit the kitchen had become a substitute for something else. The lost, real feeling of homeyness, in a real kitchen that forms the center of a family life.

By that time, I was acutely aware that the sense of homeyness is something you can lose, and might have to live without for long periods of time.

I had been warned: don’t chase fetishes as substitutes for feeling.

That chase can become manic. One could begin to chase fetish after fetish after fetish, literally creating chaos in one’s wake.

Kitchen Chaos

I once lived in a fantastic group of patio homes in the old town of San Juan Capistrano, built around courtyards, in a style that was very old Mexico, and very mid-century America at once . But as houses in this tract start to sell, and sell, and sell again, strange things would happen. Old, traditional, Mexican kitchens would get gutted, and the new owners would put in something brand spanking new. The old kitchen would wind up in dumpsters. In one particular house, a real beauty with an extra large lot at the end of a cul de sac that backed to a green belt– this happened to the kitchen two, three, four times. From my house, the view of the dumpster coming and going let me glimpse people around me embracing chaos and destruction, in pursuit of something.

Something that their manic pursuit rendered further and further away.

Closing Thoughts: Sensed Home as a Primitive Ground

I know I have made heavy weather of lots of foofy feelings. Now hear me out.

What if the feeling of home is the most important feeling, in the world?

Consider the possibility that homeyness, and keeping homeyness alive or losing it– are the most important things in the world.

Because they can form the entire basis for a spiritual view of the world.

Consider that the sense of home might connect to something so profound, that it makes us what we are. And makes the world what it is.

The vital question becomes, what exactly is it, that this sense connects us to? What, exactly, is Home?

We’ll address that question in my next post, in the Column Primitive Ground.