On the Concept of Home.

"I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself."~Maya Angelou

I left my childhood home when I was 18. I moved to Washington, DC to attend George Washington University. Since then, I've called the DC metro area home. Or at least I've thought of it as my home base. In recent years, I've tried very hard to think of home as anywhere I and my loved ones are rather than a single physical place.

However, the other day I heard Miranda Lambert's song "The House That Built Me". "If I could just come in, I swear I'll leave/ won't take nothing but a memory/ from the house that built me." My eyes filled with tears and I was desperately wishing to go back to the house where I grew up in New Jersey. Maybe it's the nostalgia that comes with being so close to 30 years old. Maybe it comes with growing up in general. Maybe it's something else.

You see, a few years ago, we had a house fire. The entire inside had to be gutted. Our dog and our cat died in the fire. Clothes, pictures, furniture and knick knacks were destroyed. I know that they are just things, and I didn't even live there at the time, but our entire lives were turned upside down for quite some time. My Mom, divorced with two kids living away from home, decided to move into a condo on the water that had much less maintenance rather than spend time fixing up a far too big house for one person. When I say I'm "going home for the weekend", what I mean is that I am going to spend the weekend at my Mom's condo in the town next to where I grew up.

Someone I went to high school with bought our old house and will presumably make a life there for his family. Now the inside looks nothing like it used to. New kids will grow up there, celebrate holidays there and make memories there. The house that contained all of my good childhood memories will serve that same purpose for an entire new family. There's a sort of palpable and painful beauty in that fact. I look forward to one day giving my children the same sort of home that I once had.

What do you think of as home? Has that concept changed for you over the years?

The Joy Diet: Week 2, Truth.

It's week two of reading The Joy Diet by Martha Beck with The Next Chapter Book Club.  This week's ingredient for a joyful life is truth.  There are so many juicy morsels in this week's ingredient that I hardly know where to start.  So I'll start with the truth.

The truth is that this week's ingredient challenged me in many ways, much more so than last week's "nothing".   And, if we are being honest, I didn't explore this chapter as fully as I might have liked, mostly due to a lack of time to get quiet and get introspective.  But here is what I know:  I've spent the past two years--in other ways, the past five--excavating my truth.  And it feels good.  Really good.  But it is a marathon and not a sprint and sometimes it is really challenging.

Beck includes a few useful questions for experiencing truth:  What am I feeling?  What hurts?  What is the painful story I am telling? Can I be sure that my painful story is true?  Is my painful story working? Can I think of another story that might work better?  And, my favorite of the questions and one that Beck labels an "action criterion", of the options available to me, which one brings the most love into the world?

Admittedly some days I got stuck at "what am I feeling?", which I think happens to everyone.  But on the days that I could work past that to the "Is my painful story working?" and "Which options bring the most love into the world?"  I tried these questions in relationship to questions and situations both big and small that I faced this week and found that it totally changed not only my perspective, but also how I reacted to what I was facing.  Turns out truth really is all it is cracked up to be and it brings a sense of peace with it.

And I leave you with a quote:

"Victor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor of the Nazi death camps, said, "There are two ways to go to the gas chamber: free or not free."  It is the truth that offers us this freedom, the freedom to test what we are taught, to accept what we feel in our hearts, to believe what we know in our bones, and to love ourselves--including the worst aspects of ourselves--until we see through enough of our illusions to discover who we were really meant to be."~Martha Beck, The Joy Diet, p. 44

{Photo credit: emdot}