Home is a Cup of Tea: Chapter 4
On the equation for home.
Hello! And welcome to Dandelion Seeds, an illustrated newsletter from my desk to yours.
In this week’s installment of “Home is a Cup of Tea” (here’s part one, if you’re just joining in), we’re changing things up just a bit. Today we’ve got a little math problem to solve, or what I’ve come to think of as the equation for home. What are the things that help us feel we’ve not only stayed in a place, but have truly lived there and can call it home?
During my time in the far north of Norway, a fellow traveler and I came up with one answer, but I hope you’ll join in the comments and share your own. What is your equation for home?
Another gentle but thought-provoking essay on the journey. I am currently in Mexico, an amazing city called Oaxaca. This is my third long stay here, and I feel at home. I know the streets, I know the rhythms, I'm sipping a cup of Jamaica and later I'll wander down the street for a tlyauda. Three weeks from now I'll return to Canada, where I'll settle into my 'home' there. My worldly goods (much reduced) are in storage, and I will be my youngest son's roomie. Sometimes I feel like a turtle, home is where I am.
That José chap sounds nice! #spoilers
My sense of home is very...different right now, compared to the one I thought I knew? It used to be about specific places and things, and some of it still is - for example, the cabin I'm living in. But it's also a *route*. It's a set of relationships on a map, and a sense of virtual movements determined by the activities that make me feel like I'm alive and in the world, particularly focused on my newsletter but other stuff too...
But it's also, in theory, my 60-litre rucksack and everything I can stuff into it when I move between places. (Except, considering I've been in the same place for over two years, that's a bit deceptive - I've now accumulated maybe two or three rucksacks of stuff due to materialistic creep, and getting rid of most of it again will be a lot of yikes.)
I think what I'm finding, at the age of 52 (which is unexpected), is that when you're not sure exactly where your home is, you can have fun choosing - including in a way where you tick many or even all the available boxes, instead of just one.