Dream about home...

I had a dream the other night... I was at the farm (where I grew up, on the northern outskirts of Edmonton, Alberta, near the city of Fort Saskatchewan) but instead of rolling prairie, the landscape was dominated by mountains to the north and east. I was walking, about to start climbing the eastern mountain range because... I don't know why.

But it makes me suspect that I now consider Vancouver to be my home, at least as much as the Fort. And that I'm eager to head to Newfoundland for new experiences.

The awareness of "home" has been an important one for me, tied in with some of the greatest hurts and struggles in my life. At one point a few years ago, I came up with the idea that my entire post-adolescent life had been spent in the search for a secure sense of home, and that it was a series of failures in this quest that led to my great depression. I have from time to time been "satisfied" with my situation, only to watch it change and disappear from beneath me.

I decided at that point that I needed to reconcile myself to the possibility (and perhaps the certainty?) that I would never be in a place that would satisfy both the sense of home and the sense of security. But how to do this without becoming paranoid and insular? Every time my situation became "satisfactory" would I begin to question its longevity? In other words, would I be saying to myself, "This is so good, it can never last?"

It was clear to me, that I would have to work and pay attention in order to find a better way. I once read a book (I believe it was called "The Gender Knot") that presented the image of a person who lives in the woods and mountains with no set place to call home. And though he rarely knows exactly where he is (relative to any permanent reference point) he is never lost, because he is so familiar with his surroundings and their processes that he is comfortable and "at-home" wherever he goes.

This became a vision for me in my work around my sense of home and security. To be "homeless" in some sort of constructive sense - to find security and home in something other than physical locations or other people. And yet, we must be "emplaced" and connected with others to be complete. How to negotiate the boundaries of self and home and be meaningfully connected with our surroundings and our community, without overinvesting emotionally?

And it is the "overinvesting" part that is key, rather than "investing" - I have to invest emotionally in my friends and in the place where I live. But I have come to terms with the fact that things will change, and it will hurt. I'm okay with the hurt. Because it means that I was engaged with something, involved with something, present to something. And instead of cutting off, closing down, numbing out when I hurt, I can instead open up, reach out, and get in touch, and know that I will hurt again.

So am I a person who is at home wherever I go? Maybe my dream says something like that. Maybe I have found a secure home in something other than people and places, like I had hoped to do. What I know for sure, is that I love Vancouver, and Edmonton, and I love my friends and my family, and I'm ready to go other places and love other people, and even if I don't know exactly where I am, I don't expect I'll feel quite so lost ever again.

Amen.