How do we find home?

/ Laura Lee Carter

When the full moon woke me up in the middle of the night this past weekend, I started thinking about all of the places I have lived and visited. Actually it all began with trying to remember exactly which years I lived in Colorado Springs. This may seem strange, but when I started writing down all the places I have lived or stayed at least a week or two, it added up to six U.S. states and ten plus foreign countries. I lived in four different towns before first grade. No wonder at the ripe old age of 60 I was ready to settle down and stay somewhere for a while.

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My young explorer self in Northern Thailand around age 19

This didn’t start out as a life plan for me. Things just worked out this way. Wherever I went I would stay a couple of years and slowly the urge would arise to move on. I remember when I got my first professional librarian position at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, the director ask me not to stay forever in my first job. He needn’t have worried. I was out of there in exactly three years.

I used to kid with myself about “Moving on to greater failures…” Of course it helped that I didn’t marry until much later, and never had kids. I simply had no interest in all that. I wanted to see the world, exploring both the world outside my door, and the more interesting one inside my own mind.

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Sitting with my first set of dogs, Mica & Calla, in 1996

I also picked up a few college and graduate degrees along the way. For quite a while I wanted to teach Chinese history at the college level. Then, after learning Chinese and getting an M.A. in Chinese history, I decided I was sick of China and university teaching was too limiting in its depth and scope. Since Naropa University was located right down the hill from University of Colorado in Boulder, I walked down there to find a whole new perspective on life and psychology, transpersonal psychology. This was my spiritual home, and I have been pursuing it ever since. This is something you can study anywhere and everywhere. Human and animal behavior is my thing…

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But still in all of that moving from here to there, I never found a place I could truly call home. What does that mean? To me it means a place where you will die knowing that you truly belong. That place where you can see your ashes blowing in the wind, and know you are finally home.

I didn’t know how I would find that place or if it would find me, but it did. At first I did not recognize this Pinon-Juniper woodland looking up at the Sangre de Cristo mountains as my place. I only knew I was home after we built solar here and then got comfortable for a few years.

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I know every morning when I go outside and marvel one more time at the perfect silence of the sunrises and sunsets here. I know when I work in my native plants garden, collecting interesting plants from around the region. I know when new birds stop by to feed and drink or when a stray Road Runner peeks in my window.

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I know because every time I return home I think,  Wow! Do I really live here?

14 thoughts on “How do we find home?”

  3. This is beautiful and how I want to feel again..I feel homeless right now, even though I have a home…or a house…it may take me a while but I will do it again…I had several homes in my life time and want to have one again…a place where I can feel the way you describe your home…you are blessed…

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  5. Like you I have moved quite a bit in my life. Unlike you though I had children. I like the way you describe the place you feel most at home at as the place where you can see your ashes blowing in the wind. I have been thinking about that a lot lately. I even have a cactus picked out in my yard where I want them scattered. That is when you know you are home.

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  7. I’m glad you found your place! Maybe I will again after I satisfy this wanderlust in me. I used to look forward to going home. Would actually clean my house before I went on vacation so that it would feel wonderful to come home to and not feel like I needed to do housework. But, after this past year, when we took our longest vacation to date (three weeks, instead of two—I know, not really long, but long for us) I didn’t want to come home. The only thing that dragged us back were obligations, not the need to “feel” my home again.

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