[F4Thought] Home Is Not A Setting On My SatNav

Home is not a physical place that I recognise.  I was uprooted from the last place I last considered to be a physical place to call home at the age of eight.  I’ve never since thought of a building, town or even a wide geographic location as home.

The closest I got to that was all those flights back across the Atlantic.  Looking out of the window as the plane encountered Ireland, then Wales and England.  It was the ever so vivid colour green.  There was always something special about the lushness of the green emanating from the British Isles.  At 35,000 feet I always got the sensation of returning to a vague personal definition of home.  And since I never ate on a plane the other concept of arriving home was looking forward to a Little Chef Olympic Feast Breakfast at a motorway service station on the drive back to my actual home.

But it wasn’t my actual home, was it ?  For over thirty years the place that gets labelled as “my home” might just as well have been a hotel room for all the attachment I associate with it.  It has a bed, a fridge and a cooker.  The most important element is that it has a door I can shut and have my privacy.  That privacy has meant the ability to dress and in more recent years to actually be 100% melody once the world is on the other side of that door.  Almost anywhere could have the same attributes provided there’s space for all those heels 😂 👠

So ‘home’ is not a physical place to me.  What else is there ?  Could I identify home as a mental or spiritual place ?

I’ve long considered it true that a human being has the capacity and often a need that can only be called spiritual.  Call it a religious drive if you will.  The need to explain things beyond our understanding has resulted in religious beliefs that obviously pre-date all recorded history.   My last post had a cheesy Star Trek movie reference and so will this one.  In the original Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Spock mind-melds with the entity VGER.  Recovering in the sick bay, he tells Kirk and McCoy that VGER is asking itself the existential question: “Is this all that I am ?”

I think that most of us ask ourselves that question and that there are various bodies of thought out there that attempt to provide an answer.  I know that many people call it home when they have an answer to that question that is personally satisfying.

I’ve had more than a passing interest in different religions.  I am essentially agnostic.  My heritage is Jewish and I grew up in a place infested with typical English Anglicanism with pockets of Catholicism, Methodism and Unitarianism.  Not far away were large pockets of Islam, Hindu, Sikh and Buddhism.  The place I would feel most spiritually at home would be with something based around gnosticism.  This is probably more a comfortable place to visit once in a while rather than be considered a home.

And that leaves the question, is there a mental place I can call home ?

A part of the answer might be that being melody is like mentally coming home, though it’s far from a complete answer.  There’s a certain amount of strife that accompanies it.  Like having annoying and noisy neighbours that can suck away the comfortable and pleasurable feelings that ‘home’ should generate.

Another answer reared its head a couple of weeks ago.  It was the first hypnosis session in a while, a gap that felt much longer because of the holidays in between.

It wasn’t that I had any doubts that I would respond to the session and her, it was whether some edge had been worn off and might take some time to re-acquire.  Instead I went deeper, with more ease and speed than ever before.  Reflecting on this in subsequent days, it hit me that my feeling at the time as I descended the levels of trance was expressed with the simple words “I belong here”.

That later reflection expanded on the concept and that to belong somewhere is as good a definition of a place to call ‘home’ as any other.

I don’t know if I meant I belonged in that state or place, or belonged to her.  No doubt the reality is a complex mixture of all those things.

In considering the concept behind this prompt, I think that for the first time in more than 40 years I actually have enough elements in place to describe and define a place where I feel at home – just don’t ask me to pinpoint it on a map.