home

The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.

While we tend to think of love as some faraway place, it is actually a place nearby that we have forgotten.

I saw the apartment almost as a sanatorium, a hospice clinic for my own recovery. I painted the walls in the warmest colors I could find and bought myself flowers every week, as if I were visiting myself in the hospital.

Happiness doesn't lie in conspicuous consumption and the relentless amassing of useless crap. Happiness lies in the person sitting beside you and your ability to talk to them. Happiness is clear-headed human interaction and empathy. Happiness is home. And home is not a house-home is a mythological conceit. It is a state of mind. A place of communion and unconditional love. It is where, when you cross its threshold, you finally feel at peace.

This land, although not my native land,Will be remembered forever.And the sea's lightly iced,Unsalty water.The sand on the bottom is whiter than chalk,The air is heady, like wine,And the rosy body of the pinesIs naked in the sunset hour.And the sunset itself on such waves of etherThat I just can't comprehendWhether it is the end of the day, the end of the world,Or the mystery of mysteries in me again.

But the thing which had made him fall for her, fall properly, was the way she seemed so calm and so quiet and so sad. Surrounded by noisy bankers showing off, and their variously pushy or beady or anxious or competitive wives, she seemed to be from somewhere else; a place where people carried their own burdens; a grander and realer and more honourable place. Roger didn't know that Matya spent a lot of that evening thinking about home, but he could tell that she was thinking about something, and it was that other thing which, for him, did it.

If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with.

Although claiming my true identity as a child of God, I still live as though the God to whom I am returning demands an explanation. I still think about his love as conditional and about home as a place I am not yet fully sure of. While walking home, I keep entertaining doubts about whether I will be truly welcome when I get there. As I look at my spiritual journey, my long and fatiguing trip home, I see how full it is of guilt about the past and worries about the future. I realize my failures and know that I have lost the dignity of my sonship, but I am not yet able to fully believe that where my failings are great, 'grace is always greater.' Still clinging to my sense of worthlessness, I project for myself a place far below that which belongs to the son, (p. 52).

Would a bird build its nest if it did not have its instinct for confidence in the world?

There's nothing more difficult than saying goodbye to a house where you've suffered.

I didn't mind what she called me, what anybody called me. But this was the room I had to live in. It was all I had in the way of a home. In it was everything that was mine, that had any association for me, any past, anything that took the place of a family. Not much: a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that. Nothing. Such as they were, they had all my memories.

And then you__l catch yourself thinking about something or someone who has no connection with the past. Someone who__ only yours. And you__l realize_ that this is where your life is.

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.

We__e all the same. We all have the means to save ourselves and carry ourselves home.

Sometimes I get mail for people who lived in my home before I did, and sometimes my own body seems like a home through which successive people have passed like tenants, leaving behind memories, habits, scars, skills, and other souvenirs.

Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

The most difficult journey any of us ever take in our adulthood is the return to our parents_ house. A home visit makes us recall all of the childhood events that formed us. Returning home reacquaints us with family members and our former self.

Happiness lives in every corner of your home and if you are homeless, it lives under the leaves of trees, hiding beneath the sky's cloudiness. All you need to do is to find it with patience.