Home: The Lifelong Search

By Rev. Amari Magdalena

Home, a word that conjures up a wide range of emotions, plays such an important part in our lives. Steven Spielberg immortalized, "ET Phone home.”  Perhaps a lot of sensitive people, feeling like aliens in their family of origin, felt they needed to find where home existed for them.  Thomas Wolfe, on the other hand, declared that “You Can’t Go Home Again.”  Robert Frost opined that “Home is the place where, when you have to go, they have to take you in.” Dorothy, clicked her magical heels together and chanted, “There’s no place like home.” Other proclamations of alienation or longing from different perspectives suggest that this place called home, can be pretty elusive.

Some people who grew up in the 50’s may get an image of Father Knows Best, with the authoritative, yet benevolent, male head of the family.  Others may have a different image from a sitcom relating to family and the struggles that so many experience growing up.

As I entered the New Age in the 90’s, I very often heard people saying that they just wanted to go home. It was true for me.  I did not feel I belonged in the family I’d found myself in.  Going home, meant death to a few; to others the rescue spaceship coming to take them away to some alternative reality or Universe.  However couched, it was a search for some sense of belonging.  Some of us found alternative mothers and fathers and families of choice, not chance.  They, in part, served to give us a nuclear family sense and the missed lovingness.

Decades after my immersion, and then withdrawal from some of the more fantastic aspects of the New Age, I came to the realization that the cry for home was an exclamation about ending separation. As it turned out, that disconnection was not from others, rather me.  All the judgments about the characters in my play of life, and my disappointment in not feeling connected with them, really had nothing to do with them.  They were operating in their bubble of Universe, and I in mine.

Gayle Sheehy captured this realization poignantly in Passages as she lay on the floor avoiding flying bullets in Ireland:  "No one is with me. No One can keep me safe. There is no one who won't ever leave me along." Gayle realized that only she would be with her always.  As my own passages and times a flight have taught me, better find home within.  That didn't mean, I'd never be lonely; it meant, I'd learn to find comfort in being alone.

I've said it to students over the years, and I still offer it as wisdom, the greatest love affair of your life begins with you!  Best to find those things lovable and tolerable about yourself, or your entire life will be filled with *compensatory relationships.  Those are the supposed makeup for our perceived shortcomings that invite transitory or unhappy pairings.  Trust me, I know this to be true. We will never find that person who can make us feel completely at home until we create a beautiful inward dwelling.

As Spring rapidly approaches, perhaps it is a good time to do that new season cleaning and start removing the detritus of self-judgment, self-loathing, self-recrimination and start working on creating the most beautiful temple of home, that we are capable of.  This is a kind of "do unto yourself, as you do for others you valued above yourself." Only then, will you come home to you and roll out the welcome mat to your inner light and true magnificence.

Love thyself and you will have ample love to share in generosity with others without having to set Terms of Endearment.  The wave of love will then come routinely in to your inner shores, like the tide, and wash over you always..

“If you treated your neighbors like you treat yourself, they’d move!”  Jonathan at the Lighthouse in Black Mountain, NC advised me years ago.

"The lost home that we’re seeking is ourselves; it is the story we carry within our soul.” 

Michael Meade

*Awaken Your Inner Personas: Transform Your Life

Amari Breakthrough Institute

Bringing You Home, to You!