Home is a Becoming
paying attention to little homecomings when you feel lost along the way
Home is something I’ve been thinking about for as long as I can remember. Growing up with parents whose “homes” were separated by land and ocean, language and lore, set me on a search before I had words to explain what I felt so compelled to search for. I wrote all about it in my book, Tell Me the Dream Again.
I looked for home in stories. I looked for it in faces and places. I searched maps and encyclopedias. I searched for it in the past and imagined it in the future. I wondered if I could find it in art, museums, or movies — I sometimes settled for it in someone else’s simplistic explanations. I searched for it in friendship, travel, genealogy, and romance.
As the decades have piled one upon another, I’ve begun to settle into a different kind of understanding of “home.”
Instead of always being on the lookout for something elusive out there I thought I had to grasp and put within, it’s begun to take shape “in here,” shifting the way I am and then reaching out.
Instead of a kingdom to come, it’s started to feel like a kingdom becoming right here and now, as close as the ground I stand on.
Coming home to oneself sounds like a good thing to do, as if one can just wake up one day and decide to do so. Maybe some do. For me, it has looked like a lot of wandering, it’s often felt like being lost or walking through a fog. For so long it’s felt like the directions had a missing page or line, but it’s beginning to become a little less veiled and starting to look like finding little homecomings all along the way, right in the everyday.
It’s been in the searching and failing, the questions and the unfurling. I suppose home has been a long thread stringing my stories together with time, and it has always been there at the same time.
I received some hard news last week, and it made me question why I do what I do as a writer, and if the work matters. It made me pause and consider if, “I should just give up.” I’m not giving up on it (at least not today). I don't have a tidy, triumphant, bow or Bible-verse-out-of-context to tie around the questions and reality I am wrestling to reconcile, but I do feel a little better this week thanks to honest conversations, friends, my family, meeting with my spiritual director, and taking the time and space to come back home to my inner self that can’t be diminished or made worthier by any of my doing.
Today, I’m thinking about you, and what things are hard-hitting for you right now. Is there something jolting you into fog or questions or feelings of defeat? I wonder if you feel at home, or if home feels far away and unreachable, no matter where you go, or what you do.
Home is a becoming. Maybe you need to hear that today, too.
May little homecomings that show up along the way, remind you that you are walking a path paved with love, and that love is looking for you all along the way. May you find it in bare winter branches, the call of a lone hawk, a crescent moon resting upon the canvas of a glowing pink sunrise, and in the arms of someone you love.
Home is a becoming.
Through the clink of drinks in a celebratory toast and the clink of dishes in a dirty sink, through long hours of scribbling on journal pages about all that is and is not, may you taste home. Through check-in texts, the kettle hot and singing, and the gift of being able to carry others as you have been carried, may you be embraced by the communal reality of coming home.
Home is a becoming.
May the little homecomings you find along the way — the ones you can’t keep and the ones that seem to show up only to slip away — remind you that that they are one irreplaceable stitch in a long work of mending.
Home is a becoming.
May you remember that every hello and goodbye, each start and stop, and the boundary lines and wind reaching for you in every open window, is connected by a long thread of love come down and love moved in.
Shalom is knitting you home. And nothing can stop your becoming.
Journal prompts to pick up
When and where have I felt a little homecoming this week?
Have I felt this way another time? How are these little homecomings connected?
As you process remind yourself that you don’t have to come up with a right answer if you struggle to answer these questions. Sometimes a question prompts another question that needs attention.
If you feel comfortable, invite God into this processing and into the questions and any tensions that arise.
A breath prayer to practice
Breath in: I can name what feels like home.
Breath out: My questions belong and I am not alone.
A quote to ponder
“I have found that the very feeling which has seemed to me most private, most personal and hence most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many other people. It has led me to believe that what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others. This has helped me to understand artists and poets who have dared to express the unique in themselves." - Carl Rogers (as quoted in The Wounded Healer, by Henri Nouwen)
grateful & shalomsick,
This was beautiful, friend. Your words are always a balm. Today I’ve been sitting in John’s letters and the idea that “abide” means coming home. Your reflection was synchronicity.
Tasha, I still think often of Shalom sick and my thoughts. I still find myself feeling for home and wishing I were there. I am almost seventy now and perhaps Home will take on another thought life. As always, grateful. 🥹 🙏🏼🕯️🕊️🩶❤️🩹🍉🫒🌿