I am thinking today about what the word ‘home means and how hope in the heart can make a home. Many people have lost homes in the recent bushfires and are starting again. I am about to depart from Australia and return to the UK, where, technically my home is.
I was born in Sydney and in many senses, for me, this is home. I always have a sense of rootedness and connectedness when I come here. Sydney is an embracing, welcoming city, with an evanescent warmth that permeates deep into my heart every time I set foot here. So in most senses, I consider Sydney home.
Even when I am miles away in England, I am aware I have a home here in Australia. I may be somewhat nomadic at present, but the rootedness is about identifying with the connectedness to my place of birth.
The well known adage ‘home is where the heart is’ for me rings true in this context. I am choosing to define home in terms of a feeling, rather than a building. I am always made to feel disconsolate by the word ‘homeless’ beause all of us have a home, even if we are pavement dwellers, which fortunately, I am not.
My recipe for hope today then is to be confident in one’s choice of defining one’s home and being true to oneself in how that is outworked. There is a very well known film in which the main protagonist Dorothy recants ‘there’s no place like home’. I would agree. But the definition of what the home looks like or even means is up to us as individuals to determine.
