As every writer knows, home the key to our personal mythology. The name Rosebud emblazoned on a sled—a rich man’s vivid memory of childhood. Gatsby’s mansion in West Egg, a symbol of his endless striving for acceptance. Mrs. Dalloway’s musings on her soulless marriage, as she sets the table for a dinner party. Thomas Wolfe’s anguished cry, “You can’t go home again,” rife with longing for the Southern town he left behind.
And what about those who’ve lost both a country and a way of life? In Chimananda Adiche’s Americanah, a Nigerian girl comes to the United States and is stunned by her first encounter with racism. In Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, a poet returns to Istanbul after 12 years in political exile and find his homeland rife with Islamic extremism. In Solito, Javier Zamora recalls his desperate solo flight—at the age of 9—from El Salvador through Guatemala, Mexico and the Sonoran Desert hoping to reunite with his parents in California. Madeleine L’Engle observes in The Rock That Is Higher: Story as Truth, “We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.” From The Odyssey to The Wizard of Oz, our stories are about homecoming, for a place that feels safe and secure. A sanctuary we can be our most authentic selves.
What is home, and how do we define it? And equally, important, how does it define us? That’s where our conversation starts. My advice: Don’t ask people, “Where are you from?” That’s a one-word answer, and the question itself can be misread, as an attempt to brand someone as an outsider. Ask instead, “What’s your story of home?” This is a soulful invitation—one that invites a deeper connection. “Tell me about the place you love, and I will listen.” The ancient Greeks worshipped Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, and believed that welcoming the stranger, and listening to his story was their sacred duty. So, here it is—the heart of Western civilization rests squarely on the notion of hospitality. Inviting someone across the threshold to share tales of love, loss, and adventure. To provide a home away from home. To offer the stranger food and drink—and a place to rest and recover from life’s journey.
For the past few years, I’ve been listening to their stories in a series of online seminars called. Tell Your Story of Home. Home can be a source of strength and inspiration or a source of violence and heartbreaking loss. When she was in her early 20s, Biljana fled Sarajevo on the eve of a brutal civil war. “When I left my family and my native Yugoslavia,” she said, “I was exiled from my soul.” Her search for home took her from a tango salon in London and international fame as a dancer to a quiet life in a riverboat community in Cornwall. Using dance and movement, Biljiana helps those recovering from trauma feel at home in their bodies.
Cliff, a former career counselor, is well-known in his community. His story of home revolves around his daily walks—an opportunity to connect with friends and neighbors. Dismayed that people seemed less willing to engage one another he wrote a book called “Walk in My Shoes.” His mission: to encourage people to listen to one another’s stories and to feel more at home with one another.
Mary, a lifelong social activist, was distressed after learning that her ancestors had owned slaves. How could she make amends for the fact that her family home was built on the suffering of others? Her moral discovery required us to reflect on a dark period in American history that deprived many people of their freedom and their homes.
Marie, a retired social worker, turned to nature during the pandemic, recalling the woods she had played in as a child. “The creek spoke to me through its sunlit waves, the fresh cucumber smell of a stand of cattails, the harsh cac-cac of a red-winged blackbird. It absorbed my loneliness and transmuted it into joy, as I recognized my vibrating reflection in the surface of the gray-green water.” To recapture this magic, she has planted native trees and wildflowers, making her suburban yard into a sprawling meadow.
Emily Babette, an artist in her 30s, assembled photographs of her childhood houses for a recent exhibition. On the move between Canada, the U.S. and Australia, Emily had no roots. “Each home was temporary,” she said, “serving as a backdrop for our fragmenting family. My great grandmother fled Germany during World War II. Each place was an echo of what could have been before the devastation.” One of her most intriguing works is a doll’s house in a net, which speaks to our need to retrieve our early memories of home.
During the early days of the Covid pandemic, Susan moved from Northern California to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. How to understand the culture and its people when the shops were closed and all the houses shuttered? Every morning Susan walked through a different neighborhood and photographed the empty streets. “I ventured in all directions and shared my discoveries online: a tiled archway, shadows of succulents on a high terrace, a lone figure sweeping an entryway,” she said. “The town’s colorful peeling walls began to resemble maps, and the silent everyday life that people were living during the pandemic revealed itself at every turn. I posted these images on Facebook and the locals said I’d shown them aspects of the city they’d never noticed before.”
And what happens when a place we love has changed beyond all recognition? Susannah, a pioneering environmentalist, felt her small town had lost its character. The artists, musicians, and activists had moved on, their small wooden cottages replaced by mega-homes. Suddenly she was looking at her favorite places—a stand of redwoods, a favorite birding trail—with “goodbye eyes.” “I’m taking my leave,” Susannah said, “with no idea where home is going to be. Each day is a Zen exercise in embracing uncertainty.”
Our story of home is a litmus test of what we value as a society, a reflection of the kind of world we are about to leave our children. One day my class watched a video of a 7-year-old Ukrainian girl singing “Let It Go” from the Disney film, Frozen, in the half-light of a Kyiv bomb shelter. This is what we know after centuries of war and aggression: Home is hallowed ground. And when it’s under threat, we carry it deep within. Home isn’t just four walls with a kitchen and a bed. It’s a hope, a dream, and anthem. Something that lodges in the soul and stays with us during any hardships we endure.
This book explores home as the stage set for the unfolding of a life. These are the stories we bring across the threshold to a therapy session. But they are, by no means, confined to the 50-minute hour of introspection. The theme of home weaves through our intimate conversations and illuminates everything we hold dear. One of the first things we do to solidify a relationship is bring that person home, introducing a friend or loved on to the people and place that shaped us. To the home we will later try to repair or recreate. One thing I’ve learned over my years of teaching and offering spiritual guidance: Our story of home is the story of our lives.
At the end of each chapter, I’ve included a set of writing prompts to help you gather your memories of all things “homely.” I encourage you to share your discoveries with someone you respect and trust. You can also make this the topic for several meetings of your book club or discussion group. A good way to open your conversation is with your first memory of home. How did it leave its mark upon your imagination? In what way did this place set the stage for the mythic journey?
My first residence was a large brick apartment at 1 South Munn Avenue, in East Orange, New Jersey. From the window of our 4th floor apartment, you could see a giant-sized Pabst Blue Ribbon beer bottle perched on the roof of nearby warehouse. On sweltering summer days, it was like a mirage—something cool and refreshing, and just barely out of reach. In the years ahead, my parents hopscotched from one suburb to the next, and I kept scanning the horizon, compensating for our tenuous existence with the belief that there was something wonderful just around the corner. This was my introduction to the American dream.
As an adult, I repeated my childhood pattern of relocating every two years as if this pattern were encoded in my DNA. With every move, I’d go into a frenzy of homemaking, hanging all pictures, putting the china put away, and unpacking all the linens within the first 24 hours. My friend Jean Shinoda Bolen visited me in my last three homes, a day or two after the moving van left. Each time, we sat down to dinner with pressed napkins, fresh flowers, and nary a box in sight. “How do you manage it?” she asked. “Everything so perfect, all your things so beautifully in place.”
“While I’m moving,” I replied, “I think of all belongings held captive in their boxes, waiting to be come back to life. Vases ready to be filled, towels and linens longing to provide comfort, porcelain plates eager to take their place upon the table, books wanting eagerly to be read. When I’ve liberated my things from their containers, when I’ve made the bed and cooked a meal for friends, life begins anew. Housekeeping is an act of faith, an opportunity for regeneration.”
Is keeping an orderly household also a way of compensating for a messy childhood? On some level, perhaps—but there’s more to it. Home is the word we whisper like a prayer as we cross the threshold. The desiderata that we carry from one location to the next, no matter how many times we move. It’s an invocation of everything we hold dear. A belief in that good fortune will follow us into the next set of rooms, into the next phase of life.
Many of us consider home to be a state of mind. We often speak of the ability to “feel at home” in our own skin, or with another person. As Herman Hesse notes in his novel, Demian, “Where paths that have an affinity for each other intersect, the whole world looks like home, for a time.” This sense of rightness occurs when we connect with someone who shares our deepest longings and desires. We create a sense of home by dropping the mask and showing who we really are. Home isn’t just a place. It’s a series of shared moments—a confluence of affinities.
A few other topics to bear in mind as you explore home as the arc of your development:
- How does your home support your creativity?
- What places come to mind when you hear the word sanctuary?
- How is your idea of home affected by things beyond your control—in terms of the economy, technology, social unrest, and climate change?
- Where have you felt at home in nature?
- What is the essence of home you hope to pass on to the next generation?
Home is an exercise in memory. A way of summoning up the sweep and meaning of our lives. When I have trouble falling sleep, instead counting sheep, I count houses, considering what challenged me and what sustained me in every place I’ve ever lived. I picture our living room in the gabled house at 101 Conant Street, in Hillside, New Jersey—the where my family settled longest. In a flash, it all comes back. The tinkling of the glasses, the smell of bourbon and perfume at my parent’s parties. How exciting it was to stay up past my bedtime, stacking records on the hi-fi (Tommy Dorsey, Nat King Cole, The Mills Brothers. This was a time my parents were happy, and they passed their contentment on to me.
Next, I recall our red brick apartment building at Short Hills Circle, a development known as “Death Valley” because it was built between two cemeteries. I flashback to the day I broke my arm roller-skating on the cracked pavement and the weeks I practiced the piano in a weighty cast. It was there I made a lifelong friend—Nancy—who danced and drew her own stories. Together we found a home in the imagination.
On Rector Street in Milburn, I kept a packed suitcase in my closet. Once a month, my mother threatened to leave my father and yelled “Pack your things. We’re leaving now!” But she had no edit plan and we ended up sitting in the kitchen, waiting for my father, long after dinner was cold. Soon, I avoided coming home as well, finding refuge with the Italian family downstairs who consoled me with fresh baked bread, lasagna, and cannoli and their hearty laughter.
In Maplewood, we lived in a big rambling house where I hosted a BBQ for my new friends. Yet I never became part of the group. I was a loner by nature, spending Saturdays on my bed with the history and philosophy tomes I’d brought home from the library. I still associate reading with sensual pleasure, recalling the sweet scent of the magnolia blooming just outside my window.
Three years later, my parents separated and I moved into my aunt’s tidy ranch house in Colonia. While my mother sewed us Easter outfits with matching pillbox hats. I read French poetry, and fell madly in love with the boy next door. But after my senior year in high school my aunt took her life, leaving behind a litany of her losses—in her diary she described the death of her mother during the 1918 flu epidemic, leaving home at 16 and fending for herself during the depression, the tragic deaths of two siblings, and a vivid description of more pain and sorrow than I knew existed in this world..
Home is where you learn that life is complicated, the people close to you are wounded, and some of them are broken. At times of unbearable loss, what do we require of home? Ad why do its ghosts follow us from one place to the next? This is the advice the poet Maya Angelou once gave her daughter: “I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and the dragons of home under one’s skin, at the extreme corners of one’s eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.” Home is the sum of our experience. It’s our instinctive response to life. Our source of sorrow and resilience.
What to do when you’re feeling lost and low? The novelist Annie Lamott says making a friend feel at home is a way of grounding ourselves. “I do for myself exactly what I would do for you – make a lovely cup of tea, or a hot bath, or go buy myself a fabulous pair of socks. I believe that you take the action, and THEN the insight follows – I do loving things for me, stroke my own shoulder, put myself down for a short nap, and the insight follows: that I am a wild precious woman, a human merely being, as e e cummings put it, deserving of respect, tenderness, protection, delight, and solidarity. And that is what Home looks like for me now.”
This is what I’ve learned over the years: Our relationship to home isn’t set in stone. It’s a work in progress. One that’s full of sudden twists and surprises. When I was in my mid-thirties, I bought an old stone farmhouse in the Hudson Valley, then after moving in, discovered that my ancestors had lived there for 11 generations. According to the local historical society, the Van Osterhouts were among the founders of Old Hurley in 1662. When I discovered this connection, I had the eerie sense that this house had called me back to care for it. Yes, the girl who had moved every other year, the perennial “new kid on the block,” had finally found her roots.
Living in an old stone house is like inhabiting a piece of history. This one had a beehive oven in the basement for baking bread, a dying room on the first floor, and a front door big enough to get a casket in. And, of course, there was a resident ghost. According to local lore, Ezra had saved the lives of a young couple whose car had skidded off the road in a bitter storm. He had rattled the shutters, waking the residents so they could call an ambulance. Ezra was, by all accounts, a helpful spirit, and, in this dwelling, I never felt frightened or alone.
The Hudson Valley also gave me an environmental education, forged my identity as a writer, and grounded me deeply in the past. There, I wrote A Passion for this Earth, considering how our character is shaped by a certain place. “What inner stability,” I asked, “do we achieve by living close to nature? What is so important about simply being where we are?” I was tethered to a village by ancestors who had arrived before the American Revolution. I came to appreciate the wide Colonial floorboards (contraband reserved for the British Navy), the fireback in the living room that could heat the entire house, the patterns made by candlelight on the old horse-hair plaster walls. I had never felt so grounded, so at peace. So fully home.
As soon as I finished my book, the house began to misbehave. That spring, the electricity shorted out, the gophers ate 500 tulip bulbs I had planted along the front walk, and icy water filled the basement. Allergic to the mold and damp, I lay in bed for months, struggling to breathe. The doctors said there was nothing to be done. I would simply have to move to a drier climate. But how could I leave the home I had so lovingly restored? Friends in California invited me to stay on their ranch in Sonoma and I accepted with a heavy heart. But as I waited for my ride to the airport, I lost my nerve. Standing in front of the 18th-century mirror in the hall, I addressed the ghost. “Oh Ezra. I can’t abandon you or this place. This is my true home.” With that, the mirror fell from the wall and shattered. The spirit of the house had spoken, and its message was clear: It was time for me to go.
The Hurley house took four years to sell, and I lost every penny I put into it. But I fell in love in the San Francisco Bay, with its majestic bridge and its golden hills. It was here I founded Sacred Words: A Center for Healing Stories, offering workshops for women in transition. We explored the heroine’s journey—the task of leaving home, and sometimes losing everything to remake ourselves. My story of home, I like to say, is just like any other. A tale of love and loss. A search for sanctuary. A call to reinvention.
For the past ten years, I have lived in a small artist’s studio nestled among the California redwoods. The cottage had belonged to a noted artist and iron worker in the 1920s who understood the mythology of home. My door handle is in the shape of an owl, there were dragons on the lantern near the front door, and acanthus leaves adorn the forge on the closed-in porch that is now my bedroom. The metal work on the heavy wooden doors is in the Tudor style. And on the outdoor chimney is a kneeling wood nymph. A weathervane bears the motto, Sursum corda, “Let us lift up our hearts.” In this redwood cottage, I began to teach my writing classes on our story of home.
Gaston Bachelard observed in The Poetics of Space. “If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” This is the aspect of home that most intrigues me. The one thing I have always looked for in a home? A sense of reverie. In the 1920s, Marjorie Kennan Rawlings was living in Manhattan and sending dark Gothic tales to her editor, Maxwell Perkins. She eventually moved to a farmhouse in Cross Creek, Florida, where she learned to live in nature and wrote her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Yearling. In this rural setting, Rawlings found her voice. “I don’t know how anyone can live without a small place of enchantment to return to,” she said, describing her love for the community and its simple way of life. I hope you will find some of that magic as you contemplate your own story of home.
You can order Our Story of Home from Chiron Publications and from Amazon here.
UPDATE: Our first edition has sold out, and a new print run will be available in January.
