04 Apr HOME

“Home.” When I vocalize the word, it resonates in my throat and chest. I elongate the central vowel sound and the tone grounds me in the place where I am writing, the place where my imagination is wandering to an unknown destination, home. Four letters, a single syllable – H O M E – brings to mind a wooden, hand-painted, heart-shaped placard, “Home Sweet Home.” The image is accompanied by the smell of bacon and coffee. This is just a conventional concept I’ve adopted, not a home that I’ve ever known.

If I were to dig into the box in my closet which is full of Hindu tracts that I have saved since childhood, the unfading smell of sandalwood incense would take me home to a memory of my father reading me the great epics of India at bedtime. The dramas, vividly illustrated, ignited my early imagination. I would also smell my mother’s fragrant Basmati rice dish, made with peas, mushrooms, cumin, and ghee, a recipe from the Himalayan Mountain Cookery book. Holding that brown plastic spiral-bound 1970s book takes me home. I recall the joyful satsangs and potlucks of my parent’s spiritual community. I recall being a toddler clinging to my mother’s soft body, and her long cotton skirts.

My “home”town in the Sonoran Desert never felt like home. Poverty and housing insecurity in my childhood made me rich with the experiences of living in countless different “homes.” My mother and I moved nearly every year, from one rental to the next. I was always optimistic about the change, until I wasn’t. What helped me make each new apartment a “home” was drawing my new room ahead of each move. In my imagination I would enter the blank space and fill it with story. Reverie has been my constant home.

Leaving home for college sent me on the pilgrimage I am still on, seeking the place where I belong, my True Home, my Soul’s Home.

 I lived in the dense, verdant, old growth forests of Olympia, Washington. The rain felt like home. In Paris, French architecture, fine art, fashion, culture, and language felt like home. In Portland, Oregon, damp russet and umber leaves falling in the single season I lived there felt like home.

When I was 22, I took a job in spectacular San Francisco. It was truly a homecoming moving to the place of my birth and the place where six generations of my ancestors are buried. A place of so much maternal history. The city’s historical charm and urban buzz, hills and valleys, nooks and crannies, mountains and beaches, were my playground, and my home for seven years.

Still, the impulse to go Home drove me forward. In Richmond, Virginia, the statues and broad streets of Monument Avenue felt something like home. In Chicago, diagonal intersections and the sound of grinding steel, the ‘L’ trains above, felt sort of like home.

It occurs to me that my soul is carrying many maps of former lifetimes, former homes.  The path that leads to my ‘Tue Home’ might stretch the rest of this life until it leads me to my final destination, my final home, the ground.

In Boulder I am becoming familiar with the ground. The climate and topography are…almost perfect. The scale of the city is just about right. Here I live at the border of urban and wild, and the threshold between conscious and unconscious. This is the doorway to the Soul. When I am enveloped by Nature: the scent of sun on pine needles, the sound of water over stones, the feel of wind on my skin, there is no need to travel further. I am Home.

Catherine Brooks, 2023