Tag Archives: belonging

Home: Sweet Home

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Home: Sweet Home

You can live in a tiny house, a mansion, or even in the woods. Any of these can be a home. Home has a special place in the heart and in the law. Both our idiom of “Home sweet home” and the ideas behind stand your ground defense share their foundation in the specialness of home. Well, what exactly is it? What takes a house and makes it a home? I want to understand the feeling that comes over me when I arrive home. So, searching for answers to this question, I began contemplating what it takes to make a home.

Last year, in early 2022, I was in Hawaii, checking out what it would be like to make a home there. I ditched that idea after a 3-month stint in paradise.  Then, in April 2022, after stopping in Tokyo to pick up my belongings, I returned to my hometown Atlanta. As I searched Atlanta for a place to make my own, I lived with my family. During the last few months of 2022, I bought a townhouse; now, I am making it a home. I have come to see these essentials in a home:  a sacred physical space, an aliveness, a place of belonging, and a sense of safety.

Waking Up in a Westphalia: Adventures

 

The Sticks, Bricks, or Stones

Inside the classic American home, there are perhaps two adults and maybe two kids. The family living in the traditional American home and their possessions are the second element of a home. They are the aliveness. Not the number of bathrooms nor the tile backsplash, but the gathered little details of daily life bring a place alive. A house needs activity to be a home. A home is a place that celebrates and supports the lives of the people living there. It is easy to note the absence of homeliness in an austere Airbnb or a poorly staged home for sale. They are spaces without a living, pulsing component. A home’s lived-in-ness is my favorite visual feature of a house. The toiletries, book collection, and mementos bring home alive. Those little lived-in details like an out-of-place coffee mug and family photos make a house a home.

Beyond the physical space and life items in it, two psychological aspects make a house a home. A sense of belonging is the first. This is home where the heart is. The idea that you can be who you are. That mental sense that you belong. Whether in the family or with roommates, that sense of relaxation in your surroundings. A home is where you can be comfortable in your skin. It is a place to recharge your spirit from the trials of life. I think people mean this when they recite “home sweet home.” It is coming, physically and metaphorically, into a place of love.

 

Patio over Courtyard

Take Off Your Boots

The building is in place, life knick-knacks included, a big heartful family is there, the last element to make a house a home is a sense of safety. It is precisely this sense of safety that one seeks in a home. For us humans to thrive, we need a safe place. This desire for safety includes knowing that your things will be there when you return. That people will not hurt you at home. Your home will protect you from the elements. It is a feeling that puts you in a state of calm. You can be at ease if you have normally been hyper-vigilant out in the world. The idea is that you can be in your home without being physically accosted, evicted, or bothered.

In this way, what is unnerving about having your home broken into it is a violation of your sacred space. When I visit my mother’s home, I appreciate her physical space. It is an enormous house. Our family photos remind us of the moments we celebrate. While I sense I belong, there is a strange quality at my family home. But it no longer feels safe. In reflecting on what we lost in the burglary last month, it is overwhelmingly the loss of a sense of safety.

In this feeling, then, I feel united with many other Atlantans. I sense the dis-ease around a family behind on rent. I can understand what it would be like to distrust a roommate. It feels odd to have traveled the world with relatively few mishaps and then returning home to so quickly lose a sense of safety. Beyond my immediate family, I find this loss of safety reflected of our country at large.

Hawaii Boat House: Not At Sea

Who is Safe Now?

My eyes are open to a very late recognition.  So many others live without that sense of security. I did not fully appreciate the depth and breadth of the Black Lives Matter movement. At it its crux, I now understand. The lives of so many Americans do not feel safe. I sense that the response is the growth in the abolitionist perspective. Mutual aid and community organizers are moving on this principle. Last month, `authorities` slashed tents and encampments in the South River Forest of Atlanta. The exact entity charged with the social (but not LEGAL duty) to protect is actively working to destroy a sense of safety in south Dekalb. If we do not feel safe in the American status quo, we must unite to create a sense of security. For me, then, this is the pressing question of our times. If life in the natural order is nasty, brutish, and short (according to Rosseau), where is the golden place where we can belong, be safe, and have the physical space to nourish our life activities?

Othering & Belonging: Diversity in Georgia

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Surrounded by green pines and sitting on the red clay along Blue Ridge Lake, I stared into murky green waters. Under the water’s surface, a fish moved between the shade and the sun. She swam above rotting foliage and around a fallen branch. I watched her swim as I was digesting the hour before.

Blue Ridge Mountains, Photo by Juan Davila on Unsplash

“Where are you from?” The real estate agent asked me. I sense she was trying to size me up rather than have a conversation. I stared at her in mild shock and disbelief while trying to hide my angst. “I live in Atlanta,” I responded with blank eyes. I felt judged and was reluctant to gab.

Inside my head, I meet with my vagabond turmoil. My mixed bag of responses floats in my head. “I am from nowhere. I am from everywhere. A three-continent list would be the beginning of my life story and genealogy.” But really, who has time for all that? Actually, I no longer know where I am from. I am living in a constant state of flux. Identity, ultimately, is a limiting form of identification.  

How to Belong in Georgia?

Lately, there is a more significant issue. I no longer know where I belong. I feel like that oil slick hanging in the finger of Blue Ridge Lake- challenging to mix and sprinkled with yellow pollen dust. This theme, where are you from, I have touched on before. In Georgia, and in particular, now, this is a loaded question. I think the more relevant questions are: “Can we get to know each other? Where are we going? How can we work together to get there?”

Today, I am from a place where old lessons mix with an even older desire. Another middle-aged lady asks the same kind of question in the next hour. I looked for a non-BBQ lunch option and saw a well-loved Cuban sandwich shop in downtown Blue Ridge. After discussing the yucca frita, she asked, “What is your nationality?” I told her my ethnicity and that my forefathers are from India originally. She told me I looked Latina, and I grinned in acknowledgment.”How about you?” I asked back. She responded with a short history, “I am Tampanea (from Tampa, Florida). My father was from Spain, and my mother was from Italy. And then, my husband from Cuba. So here I am, arroz con mango.” The expression was perfect! A strange mix of rice and mango. I smiled, and we went on to a chat about Georgia turning blue in 2020. She mentioned that in the mountains of Georgia, there are pockets of people from everywhere. Her words absolutely resonated. I remembered my days of grass-roots campaigning; Atlanta is that salad bowl type of mix.  

Cortado Photo by Tyler Nix on Pexels.com

Our Rich Heritage

After lunch and cortado, I strolled along the train tracks cutting through downtown Blue Ridge. On a parallel street, tucked between strip centers sporting Trump posters, a shop called The Joint caught my attention. The shop includes a Beetle parked out front and psychedelic colored furniture on the grass. Here, I found an Atlanta ex-pat. For a little while, we both lived in Homepark. The Mudcats, a local Atlanta band I followed, played at her wedding. We chatted briefly about Georgia and the changes in Atlanta. Between our old memories and the mountain air, I knew I was related and belonged somehow to the history of this red-blue patchwork state.

The Trump Store just outside Ellijay

Heading back to the Airbnb, I pulled over for an irresistible photo. I spotted a real-life Trump Store behind a McDonald’s in a strip plaza adorned with for lease signs and potholes. Next door to the store stood a Vietnamese-American photo studio, and two doors further down was a Mexican restaurant, Mucho Kaliente. The dim-lit Trump shop sported a flyer for an Indian-American Labor Commissioner. Mr. Bhatt here poses with Trump as he campaigned for “Georgia First” & “America First.” That night, from my country farmstead Airbnb, I wondered how he would balance those with Trump’s racist rhetoric. I simmered on this while my Christian Korean-American host family cooked bibimbap downstairs.

Georgia Roots & Atlanta Dramas

Everybody I encounter in Atlanta is from somewhere else. The only people with ancient knowledge of the land in Georgia were pushed away. That now illicit history traced further back points at the ugly roots of our national story. The reckoning with our past is a step into what we are working towards. That is the only thing that will bring us all together. I am less interested in anyone’s background. I am more interested in their heart and how we can make space for all of us to belong. Atlanta is quickly gentrifying parts of its classic inner-city neighborhoods. Traffic along the 285 Perimeter gets worse annually. The effects of global warming make Atlanta even hotter. There are so many issues that touch all of us. It takes an understanding of where we want to go to work together.

Traffic is Democratizing; We all slow down (not Atlanta) Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Our Spiritual Evolution

A force moving us towards inclusion and cross-cultural understanding is the process of our spiritual evolution. One of my favorite books, The Road Less Traveled, puts it this way:

The notion that the plane of mankind’s spiritual development is in a process of ascension may hardly seem realistic to a generation disillusioned with the dream of progress. Every-where is war, corruption and pollution. How could one reasonably suggest that the human race is spiritually progressing? Yet that is exactly what I suggest. Our very sense of disillusionment arises from the fact that we expect more of ourselves than our forebears did of themselves. Human behavior that we find repugnant and outrageous today was accepted as a matter of course yesteryear.

Dr. Scott Peck

Dr. Peck builds his idea of spiritual development throughout his book. Essentially, energy and intention toward progress grow from individual effort. First, a person works towards putting their spiritual house in order, connecting values with action, purpose, and discipline. That effort is personal progress. From there, people work to bring alignment into their community. They empathize when others are wronged; they work with a sense of purpose in their day-to-day relationships.

We Do Love One Another

We unite against displacement, injustice, or “othering” which we do not suffer because of our spiritual evolution. The situation in Ukraine is an example of this. In western countries, there is a wellspring in support of Ukraine. (Of course, for another post, this support has a sharp edge. Why don’t we feel the same sympathy for the loss of life in Palestine, Syria, and Yemen?) I was in Japan when the world rose in anger against the murder of George Floyd. For a while, the Facebook group I admin-ed was a flood of support, irrespective of race. Later, in Tokyo, many locals and foreigners united for the Black Lives Matter march. In the US, mass shooting occurs regularly. How much longer till we bring together a balance of competing interests in the gun debate?

The very fact that we care about others speaks to our collective spiritual evolution. While the world gets smaller, thanks to technology and transportation, we can move towards a genuinely pluralistic society. We get there by working on what unites us rather than what divides us. A shared future, a shared planet, and healthier public institutions are the steps to make Georgia part of an even better Earth. Just as we seek ways to honor the rights of those we consider “different” from us, we can actively create a sense of belonging. We can work towards belonging regardless of political leanings, ethnic background, and economic class. There are infinite ways in which we can support one another. The goal, I believe, is to find how we are united rather than how we are different.