authentic home

Just thinking, more and more, during the new year, that a home -- a successful home -- is far from being the sum of it's accoutrements.

The stage is good, the settings important: but, really, isn't love all?

A home is commitment. A daily joy, a daily slog. It's the warmth of opening a door to be somewhere you want to be. It's the indefinable scent of love: you know when you are home. It is sweet.

But not easy, home is not. Home must be built, and it is in this I am finding (this is the more and more part) that it is built not on furniture and fixtures but upon care and strong abiding.

Chairs, I have found, are the easy part. The hard part is making room in the home, always, for love and care to sit.

As busy as our lives can be, this is an often combustible mix. To have a perfect (looking) home [glance around] and to have a home where love can sit, relax, become soothed/become energized, have strength to go forth into the world...well.

Home is so much more than a good snapshot of a perfect space.

And this is part of the new direction. To find home, to find where we want to be: it is seeming, to me, that chairs (tiles, floors, fabrics, fixtures) have very (very) little to do with it.

For years, I struggled (a former army brat) to give my children roots. That they would be from somewhere; this seemed so important! (The military is a noble place to be from, but we were there no longer.)

As a treasured friend wrote the other day (and this I think I always knew but would not admit so readily, fearing that we must all be someone from somewhere): our roots are in our hearts.

It is this that draws me in more and more now.

Our roots are in our hearts.

How do we make our home around that?

To me, the question is one of pure delight and utmost fascination. This is authentic home. It is what matters to me most. To be a somebody from somewhere means less and less. Nothing, soon, I hope.

To know where your true home is. That means everything, doesn't it?

How to create a real home? One must begin by being honest (in a steadfast and ready way) to their heart. From here all things are done. The rest, as I've learned from another dear friend, manifests itself. Patience. Strength. Elbow grease. Breath. Love. And more patience.

(Let it be noted that I will always be charmed by the art of an excellent chair.)

Onward.