Poe-a-tree Hop
When I saw Roy’s post yesterday http://royd-spiltmilk.blogspot.com/2011/10/poe-tree-hop.html asking us bloggers to write something about “Home is where…. ”, my first thoughts were, I couldn’t do this. I write poetry mostly and I couldn’t think of any rhyming lines about a home. Today I read and commented on some of the beautiful things my blogger friends have written about it and it got me thinking. Can I too pen my thoughts on these lines? I pondered on it, about what a home means to me and these are my thoughts.
For everyone who reads these lines, “Home is where…”, the first thoughts are “the heart is”, it is about the place they lived with their parents and shared their childhood memories or their present ones surrounded by love, laughter, happiness and people they love. Yes, we all have such homes. But I’d like to believe that a home goes beyond concrete structures. It needn’t necessarily be a house that you make a home of. I believe it can be anything, a place, a house, a situation, a job. “Home” is a state of the mind, where you feel you connect in your heart, where you finally feel safe and happy.
I have beautiful memories of my childhood, growing up in my home. They were brief because I left for boarding school at the age of 10 and since then I have never really stayed home with my parents. Then my married life took me places. I have lived like a gypsy since then until now, finally I have come to roost at my mother’s nest and it is my home. I feel loved and cherished and yes there are happy memories here too. In the course of my shifts from place to place people would often ask me “Don’t you miss the place you left behind” and I would reply, “Not really because this is where my home is now”. It is where my heart is, I have built a home out of four walls.
Home is also a relationship that you cherish, where you finally feel you have come to the end of your search and met the man you love. So often, lovers tell each other “I am finally home”. What does that mean? It means they feel connected to each other through their hearts; there is comfort, a sense of being loved and nurtured in that state of loving one another. They are home with one another. Home can also be a dream job that you land up with. You feel you have at last found the job that your heart always wanted, and you can be the person you are, because you will do what you most wanted to do.
Home can be a place that you happen to be where you feel safe and comfortable. It may be a place you have never been to and yet your heart tells you it is home, that you feel you connect to it somehow.
So for me home is not only a house that people build and make into a home with love. It is a state where you can be yourself, where you can lower your guard, feel content, loved and cherished. Home is where your heart is in sync with someone, a place, or a situation. All it needs is your heart to tell you that it feels connected and you are home.