Home

Place is a physical, geographical location, this is true. Human places are the sacred and mundane spaces that we create in relationship with the land and our surroundings. They are places of experience and reflect the interrelationship of matter, spirit, emotion, and thought. What about the places we call home?

“Home” a simple four letter word packed with meaning and not easily defined. I currently live in an apartment and my lease is due to renew at the end of November and this got me to thinking about home—past, present and future. I contemplated my homing options…e.g. do I renew the lease, go month to month or look for something that might better accommodate Emma, my high energy, adolescent Australian Shepherd?

My curiosity about the word, “homing” prompted a Google search for its meaning that led me to discover a fascinating article written by Paolo Boccagni, “Homing: a category for research on space appropriation and ‘home-oriented’ mobilities.” ** The author places special emphasis on the issues of migration and mobility, critical issues facing the world today.

The author explains that home is best understood as a lifelong experience. He writes, “A promising concept to capture this process…is homing. While the ordinary academic use of this notion indicates an instinctive or automatic return to a given point, for social science purposes homing can be reconceptualized as a range of actions and interactions—some physical, virtual or imagined mobility—whereby people orient themselves towards what they feel, see or claim as home, or at least as homely-enough.”

For the time being, my place is homely-enough.

*To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2022.2046977