Guest Entry - Home by Jenna

Over the past several months, I have been carrying on various e-mail discussions about "home" with friends that have been reading my blog. Some different perspectives, many similar, all interesting and poignant. I particularly liked what my friend Jenna had to say about the concept, and would like to share a bit of her writings below...

"and then, as i read your blog, i thought of my own ideas of home. It's a topic that has occupied my thoughts many, many times over the last 10 years... if i were writing on my own computer right now, which i'm not, i would send you my first actual essay on home, which was written a few days before leaving spain in 98, and then became my college application essay... it pretty much consists in feeling torn between homes, knowing that i was about to leave, and hearing a voice in my head (parents?) saying, "Come home." and my question was, "Where is home? The first place you were? Or the last place you left?" i imagined that i had changed since leaving home, but it wasn't just me that had changed; it was also the "home" itself that had had a year to change without my presence.

at that time, it was a pretty profound dichotomy... but since then, i've discovered that the home concept is so much more complex... in fact, the first place for which i ever really, seriously felt homesick was the co-op i lived in my second year of college, which i moved back to for my last year, after italy... and yet, as i should have realized, the nature of a student residence is constant change, and the home that i'd felt so strangely justified in finally feeling saudade for was actually gone, or at least different. it was even more dramatic than the change i'd recognized in my abq home when i'd first returned. and i began to believe that home will never stay static, though it sometimes seems so, and the only way to keep it as your home is to live through its changes, to change within it, to let its changes happen around you... otherwise, we will always notice the differences, the ways in which we no longer fit into our former homes, as if you gave your favorite shoes to your best friend for a year and then tried them on again to discover that they no longer had that special perfection of form-fit to your feet...besides which, your feet had grown...

and as i continue on, i have considered that perhaps the meaning of home involves more than a place, more than a house, or the cafes where you're a regular, or the landscape, the weather, even the people and creatures who live there too; it's a junction of geographical, historical, and personal connections that compose a structure of familiarity and acceptance, which goes two ways: you accept the familiar home, and the home accepts the familiar you. and the size and shape of that home varies dramatically, be it a whole city/state/country, or one room of a house, or even in that most romantic of senses, the presence of a beloved other person... in any case, that is my current home theory... which leaves itself totally open to interpretation, something i've come to enjoy about theories (probably the result of too much po-mo lit-crit training)...

it's an attempt to incorporate all the other theories i've come up with over the years. but in the end, the theory is not what matters. it only gives us guidance and a feeling of credence to select what we mean by home... sometimes, all that matters is that we can feel at home in ourselves, especially when deprived of familiar houses or neighborhoods or park swings... i have been trying to accept the familiar me for the moment, to be at home in myself on this planet... i don't know how much sense that makes, but i think it has to do with decent self-esteem while still maintaining a critical stance and an ability to change and transform..."

By the way, guest entries are always welcome, for any other people out there that might be so inclined...