In a previous article I mention that at age 60 I finally found home. It should have struck you as strange, but there was no echo: no comment, no commentary, no reply.
I think that you don’t know what home is… maybe?
I found a quote from Maya Angelou about “home.” It struck a cord with me, because she, just like me, found home within.
Here is the quote. Make sure you let me know if it resonated with you. OK?
I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and dragons of home under one’s skin, at the extreme corners of one’s eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.
Home is that youthful region where a child is the only real living inhabitant. Parents, siblings, and neighbors, are mysterious apparitions, who come, go, and do strange unfathomable things in and around the child, the region’s only enfranchised citizen.I am convinced that most people do not grow up. We find parking spaces and honor our credit cards. We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are still innocent and shy as magnolias.
We may act sophisticated and worldly but I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do.
~Maya Angelou from Letters to My Daughter
One of the best ways to anchor what you read on my site is by finding something to say. Just don’t try to sound sophisticated, smart, knowledgeable.
If you read what you read with the intention to share your takeaway with me, you get a lot more out of what you read, because now you have to pay attention… you can’t just scan.
Takeaway is one idea, one action, one piece of insight that you get that you say: “That is a keeper!”
Share your takeaway… no laundry lists, please. One thing. You can ask me to not publish it, and I’ll obey.
Yes, it is interesting (I learned it from the quote myself) – to vote in your own life, instead of handing the power to outside influences in your ‘home’, which are mere “apparitions”.
interesting choice of word, enfranchised… I had to look it up. It seems to mean someone with voting rights… vote in the matters of your life and actions?
We people have a tendency to go look outside of ourselves looking for our home, in circumstances, other people, or possessions, and end up building further layers, hoping for arrival sometime and the future. And somewhere in the process we forget the vulnerable, small parts of ourselves, the truly ‘enfranchised citizens’.
So perhaps it’s a good idea to look for the inner child in myself, acknowledge it.
“go inside ourselves and find home”: Reading that, I feel peace.