Home: What is home ?
It was just last week that I waved goodbye to a pair of my favourite friends. Packing up their lives, their house and their home to move to a new state, like many of my friends have done over the years.
As someone who has moved house an endless amount of times and lived “overseas” in a couple of countries, I have always had a strong sense of what I thought home to be. To me, home was always where I was born, where I grew up, where my history is, where my friends are, where my family are and where my heartfelt ties lay.
But: That mindset certainly gets a query or two from me at times like these when I realise that around 90% of my good friends and immediate family now live in distant regions, states, and even countries and that many of my remaining friends are from different countries, regions or states. Where is my home……. ?
I have lived in all sorts of places:-From the beautiful and blessed Northern Beaches of Sydney – Australia, a hostel in London’s Bayswater, old, empty and sometimes derelict buildings as a Squatter in all parts of North London, to a pig farm in South Africa. Not to forget those few months spent in a caravan in remote Origstad smack bang in the middle of ” game land territory”, South Africa.
Home: What is it I ask again ? Is it where we were born ? Where we grew up ? The building that houses us ? Where our loved ones live ? Where our heritage lies ? Or that ol’ cliche: where the heart is …………..?
Hmmm I am not really sure, it is a question I can’t quite answer.
But here are some of the places I have “laid my hat” and called home over the years.
http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/02/08/photo-challenge-home/
Pingback: Weekly Photo Challenge: Home… | Mirth and Motivation
February 10, 2013 at 9:01 am
Wow you have lot of places to call home Emma! I also wonder where home is – what gives us that familiar sense of ease, where we can be most ourselves. I had a theory that wherever you felt most loved as a child is where your strongest sense of place and home is. But then if you have lived in many places or emigrated, this feeling changes as places and cities changed. When I lived in London towards the end of two years I longed for Newtown in sydney – but when I went back, it had changed, I had changed, friends had moved on. I guess if I had a partner or kids home would be wherever they were. So if its not the place I thought I loved and its not people then I guess home is wherever I lay my hat, as the saying goes, it’s inside. Core star or heart or me , my body is my home. But even as I write that there’s some part of me that wants to call a place home, my own little place with a vege garden and a dog and friends and family all around. Which is kinda what I have now, except the vege garden is a community garden, the dog belongs to next door and my friends, like yours are all over the world. Oh Yay ! I guess I AM home…xxxx
Pingback: Weekly Photo Challenge: Home | DmG Art & Photo
Pingback: Photo Project: 52 Bolivian Sundays [week 6, 'Home']. « 3rdculturechildren