Why your home may not be your home
Where is home?
Home is not necessarily where we’re born or where we live.
Karen Blixen was a Danish author best known for her memoir Out of Africa, written under the pen name Isak Dinesen and adapted into the Academy Award-winning motion picture Out of Africa in 1985.
When Karen Blixen arrived in Kenya for the first time in 1913 she felt she had come home. She wasn’t born there and didn’t have any African roots.
“Here I am, where I ought to be,” Karen Blixen said.
When I first read that in Out of Africa, that home could be somewhere you haven’t even been to yet, I was fascinated and curious about the idea and it has stayed close to me me over the years.
Where is home?
Perhaps we will find out hundreds of years from now that an alien species has moved us to different locations in the world, away from our true homes, so we can find our way back.
I have been looking for “home” since I left my relatively stable home and life of 15 years with my ex-partner some four years ago.
Though in fact I have been looking for home my whole life.
I ran away from home when I was 17. Home was not a stable and loving place growing up, instead always unpredictable and sometimes violent. I had to leave to survive.
Perhaps the reason where and what defines our home is not a given is because it is in the searching for it that we find what we are truly looking for and are grateful.
In finding home, we find ourselves.
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