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"In truth home is holographic, existing at full power in a single tree..."
–Dr. Clarissa Estes

Jungian psychologist, master Cantadora, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D. describes home this way, "When we are young and our soul-lives collide with the desires and requirements of culture and the world, indeed we feel stranded and far from home. If we were never taught return to the soul-home in childhood, we repeat the 'theft and wandering around lost' pattern...But, we can all find our way back."

Dr. Estes describes home as, "where a thought or feeling can be sustained instead of being interrupted or torn away from us because something else is demanding our time and attention... a sustained mood or sense that allows us to experience feelings not necessarily sustained in the mundane world: wonder, vision, peace, freedom from worry, freedom from demands."

Although I rarely do yoga, about 18 months ago I attended an Anusara class led by my good friend, Bernadette Birney, and heard in the opening three chants of om – home.

Om is the center of home. There is room inside om. Many rooms–to wander, explore, be. For both Hindus and Buddhists this syllable is sacred. Roughly translated it represents pure spirit. That sounds like a good place to call home.

Amit Ray in Om Chanting and Meditation says, "Om is not just a sound or vibration...It is the entire cosmos, whatever we can see, touch, hear and feel. Moreover, it is all that is within our perception and all that is beyond our perception. It is the core of our very existence." That feels like home.

Swami Maheshwarananda gives a rather all-encompassing view of it in Ibera Verlag, "Sanskrit, sometimes regarded it as three sounds, a-u-m, symbolic of the three major Hindu deities: Bhrahma Shakti (creation), Vishnu Shakti (preservation) and Shiva Shakti (liberation, and/or destruction).

The definition itself offers unexpected insights as well:

home/hōm/

It is the place where you live.

What kind of place? A house with hard-wood floors or a field of Gerbera daisies? A virtual one under a digital roof? Or an inner space of calm curiosity?

Is the question even where? Why can't it be a series of what's? Submersion in a warm bath... the smell of wood burning? The sound of geese migrating? Or is it a time. Dusk, pregnancy, summer. Or who?

As a child and young adult, I thought it must be a type of Secret Garden, real or imagined, that I couldn't find–a feeling of belonging–connectedness. Of something I could not find. Something bigger, I could not explain.

Still, when I have unintentionally abandoned myself and it grows dark and bleak, I find myself pleading, desperately mumbling, "I want to go home, I want to go home, I want to go home..."

So, where is home? Humankind spends billions of dollars on wildlife refuges to protect the homes of the egrit, ibis, crane and wolf yet we give little thought to a refuge, a home, of our own.

Dr. Clarissa Estes describes home as, "a sustained mood or sense that allows us to experience feelings not necessarily sustained in the mundane world: wonder, vision, peace, freedom from worry, freedom from demands."

I see home in the spiritual center of the word itself–the space between the exhaled "h" and the silent "e". The chant inside.

Swami Maheshwarananda says in Ibera Verlag, "Sanskrit, sometimes regarded it as three sounds, a-u-m, symbolic of the three major Hindu deities: Bhrahma Shakti (creation), Vishnu Shakti (preservation) and Shiva Shakti (liberation, and/or destruction). It is said to be "Adi Anadi" without beginning or end and embracing all that exists."

There are no expectations inside om. No rooms to tidy. No beds to make, breakfast to clean, leaky faucets to repair. It expands into a personal universe and contracts back into a blink.

Dr. Estes says, "In truth home is holographic, existing at full power in a single tree... a pool of still water... When you focus with soul-eyes, you will see home in many, many places."

Perhaps home is closer than we think.

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Kelly Coveny View Statement

Home has been a tricky place for me to find. I had a beautiful family, lived in a beautiful house, but for me, home existed in a feeling, a spiritual sense of belonging–in the extremely ephemeral intersection of nature and what lies beyond our perception but within our unconscious. Within our deepest memory and imagination. We are taught not to go there. It isn't real. And so, for a long time, it seemed, neither was I.

Then my poppop passed. Then, my mom. Real has shifted. I'm not sure into or out of what. I am merely asking questions–of mythology, of trees, of poetry and art and Ireland. Searching for a sense of belonging.

Poet David Whyte said, "The ability to turn your face toward home is one of the great human endeavors and great human stories. No matter how far you are away from yourself, no matter how exiled you feel from your contribution to the rest of the world or to society, as a human being, all you have to do is enumerate exactly the way you don't feel at home in the world, to say exactly how you don't belong, and the moment you've uttered the dimension of your exile, you're already taking the path back to the way -- back to the place -- you should be. You're already on your way home."

Joe Carvalko View Statement

TALE OF TWO HOMES
 

As a boy I lived between my maternal grandfather's city dwelling and my paternal grandmother's farm, one pitched in the African American quarter across the street from the Blue Moon Bar, the other windblown switchgrass fields. Like a migratory bird caught between two worlds, I'd pine to hear rustling leaves along a country road, yet miss the stride along the blue-noted strip, where sorrows were drowned or heels kicked off in the revelry of Saturday night. By fourteen 5' 10" wiry, skeleton-like, my world changed, jackhammering concrete, breathing asphalt, African-Americans, greenhorn Portuguese, Puerto Rican, Italian, damned to hear the pick, shovel, sledgehammer, laying Portland cement along the roads and strips, and then vanishing into the invisible fabric of our town. As for me I long still to hear leaves rustling along a country road, the stride, the blue notes along the strips, and even the jackhammers that keep me grounded.



FAREWELL MY CITY

I reached seventeen — rebellious,
blackboard jungle moodiness — happines
rheostat turned off. Dig-it Daddio?
Cool black hole of non-conformability,
stumbling through soda-jerk jobs, I quit school.
Night before leaving town, my '52
Chevy and I rode through old neighborhoods,
past factories, docks, the plant where Dad worked,
night shift, helicopter pads, south, across
from the rowboats listing in the river,
a veil of mist kissing the street lamp
lighting mossy green mold that'd attached
to the flaked clapboard side of the theater
facing the river, no lawns, flowerbeds,
factories and their fulminations
reducing trees to wearing nothing more
than ragged leafed sweaters. I only
knew people from the factories, except
summers I'd mingled with rich kids, next town,
making love to skinny debutantes in
flimsy cotton dresses, trying to be
a white skinned cat with black and white saddle
shoes, but morning I'd cross the Housatonic
River Bridge to join the Cold War, away
from the spent, the rich, landmarks memorized
so that someday, unlike Odysseus, I'd
recognize that from whence I came, a place
where everything was familiar and old

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