Home again, home again, riggity, jig

I was thinking about that line yesterday as we travelled from Morrisburg to Rose-Bridge...I'm sure it's from an old nursery rhyme, but the question that came to me was what is 'home'? Where is home?

When I'm in residence in Rose Bridge and I refer to 'going home' I mean going to the rented house we occupy there. When I'm in Morrisburg, and I say I'm going home, I mean the house we own there that actually has most of our worldly possessions in it. When I'm staying at a B&B in Dundas and visiting family 'home' becomes the B&B...and when we're travelling in Crannie, our van becomes "home". Home seems to be a rather loose concept for me, and yet I know lots of people for whom 'home' is a very specific building, in one town where their family has likely lived all their lives.

For me, it seems, home is more like a feeling - that place where I return to for rest, for safety, and to be with people I love. Perhaps it's where my bed and toothbrush are, at any given time! Perhaps it's the fact that I've always been a nomad: we lived in an ancestral home only until I was 4 years old. Then, at the age of 10, our rented apartment burned to the ground. I lived with my parents in another rented flat until I left home for a university residence home. After that it was 2 rented apartments, 4 houses, 1 apartment, 2 houses, 2 apartments, and now 1 owned house and 1 rented and our beloved van - all at the same time!

So don't tell me you have no home! Home is indeed where the heart is. Home is where there is love, where there is space for welcoming others, where there is some measure of privacy and where you keep your bare essentials from day to day. It is where you return to and where you go out from...and isn't that, after all, our True Centre?