Samhain                                                                   New (Winter) Moon

As some of you know, I’m fascinated by the concept of home.  As we age, we fight with what powers we have to remain in our home.  Not only do we want to live in our home, we want to die in it, too.  That’s a pretty strong commitment.  What is it about home?  Why is this such a powerful idea?

A friend who has written for years about aging says it’s about what we know and especially in old age not wanting to trade what we know for what we don’t.  I imagine he’s got a good chunk of it.  Home is not only where the heart is; it’s where your pillow is and the living room and the kitchen you know.  It’s a place of memory and a place of projected peace, or at the very least projected familiarity.

Much as I respect my friend’s work and his thinking, his explanation doesn’t satisfy me. Familiarity is powerful, but the notion of home goes beyond that.  At it’s root, I suspect, is the nomad’s intimate relationship with a certain territory that could provide roots and berries in one season, tubers and fruits in another and game in another.  The linkage, the primal linkage, lies, in other words, with place and not just any place but the place that gives us sustenance.

As the neolithic revolution took hold and the hunter/gatherers began to stay more and more in one specific spot, no longer wandering throughout the year, but tending gardens and fields and livestock, the larger definition of home territory got whittled down to the village, perhaps to a small farm.

Then, when urbanization began its slow, inexorable rise home territory became associated in a diffuse way with a city, but the more particular sense of personal territory shrank to a few rooms, perhaps a house.  Note that now the territorial definition at the most intimate level is no longer related to the land, to the place that gives sustenance but to a human artifice, a built object and, in all likelihood, a built object over which you have no control

Urbanization passed the 50% mark worldwide sometime ago and the centripetal attraction of cities only grows as time goes on.  Thus, for many if not most of the world’s population the terrain of home shrinks year by year and recedes further and further from its natural roots.

Even so we don’t want to leave our condos, our apartments, our townhomes. Home is that one spot in the vast vacuum of space and on this tiny patch of life-sustaining rock that we call earth that is ours.  It is the remnant of the hunter/gatherer’s territory, and it is the one to which we belong. And note please, it is not it which belongs to us.