Excerpt From Oddball: A Memoir and Resilience
What does home really mean?
By the virtue of being physical beings, we are always in some space and place. We are in a physical, energetic, and social environment at any given time. What many don’t realize is we are not only in an environment, we are the environment to others and everything else. We are affected by what is around and within us while affecting what is around and within us. We are both ying and yang, both recipient and contributor.
They say home is where the heart is. This means home begins with you, your body, mind and spirit. It is your awareness of space and place in reference to what is outside of you. The thin veil of skin is the only thing that separates you from the “outside”. That means when your skin is broken or we are intimate with another person, we become one with our environment.
Since the beginning of our known history, humans have sought shelter from the elements in the form of “home.” The elements home has includes, external/internal material, space, line, shape, color, texture, light and patterns. It also includes sections within the home that constitute separate rooms for separate functions.
Don't take your home for granted
Today, many people take the concept of home for granted. They grew up in a home, and are in a home now and that is their everyday life normal reality. For some, it is a subject of much pain and suffering for countless reasons. It could be they lived in a home that was abusive, dysfunctional, they may have moved often and felt instability, they may have been homeless or lost their home later in life and struggled to regain it.
On the other, hand there are people who have and own multiple homes in various parts of the world. Some lay empty while some are rented out resold for profit. Home in the way I am discussing here, is a physical place where we use as shelter from the physical elements, protection from weather, and where we go to regain a sense of grounding and centering. We go there to rest, eat, restore, have some sense of privacy for hygiene or sexual behavior, private discussions, recover from illness and prepare to exit from there and venture out to the rest of the world.
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