Week 2 ~ Home

As Winter breathes her cold blessing over us, showering us with snow and ice, the silvery white of it makes the dark night glow and spangles the daylight air with diamonds. As beautiful as that all may be, however, there is something that many may consider even more so: the inside of their warm domicile. As winter settles in and makes herself comfortable, we in turn snuggle deeper into our spaces–our apartments, our houses, our homes.

Is it the warmth alone, though, that makes these spaces home? 

This is a question that I recently posed to my middle-school students, my Heroes as I call them: “What makes a place home for you?” The answers I received were very interesting.

For some, home is simply the place they live, the house or city they currently occupy,  the familiar and everyday.

For others, home is someplace else: a camp or a grandparents’ house where they always have a good time.

For others still, home is no one place. Rather, it is anywhere that they feel loved, accepted, and comfortable. Sometimes that home is a person or group of people with whom they can always feel safe and utterly themselves. No need to be perfect or strong or the life of the party. Home is where they can simply be.

That last type of answer is the one that resonates the most for me. I did not learn until I went to college that home for me is not a place. When I went off to school, I came to the realization that, yes, I missed the people that I love, but, no, I did not really miss the area that I had grown up in. And this is still true. There are things about Indiana that I vastly prefer to my Caribbean beginnings, such as the changing of the seasons (and no hurricanes). But, on the whole, I have come to learn that what makes places feel like home is the people that they hold for me. People who love me and whom I love. People who accept me but challenge me in the same turn. People who welcome me with love and laughter and to be fully myself. People who share and encourage my faith. People recognize that, though I choose kindness and softness, I am not a weak flower. I am a being with light under her skin.

Home is where that light glows warm, safe to blaze bright and brilliant. Home is the presence of those who have helped me find and cultivate that light and my sense of self. And I thank God for that every day. Home is a beauty and peace of feeling, of knowing that, with these souls, I matter, am significant, and belong. 

I hope you find your home this Holiday season and are able to rest in its beauty, comfort, and peace.