Day One: Home
Photography: Develop Your Eye
Day One: Home
Home
Photo 101 – Home
How does one define Home?
Is it the house you were born and raised in, or perhaps the town you grew up in, where your earliest connections to others were formed?
Is it a place that you only visited on special occasions, such as vacations or other family celebrations, that left sweet dreams to last through the years?
Is it a taste, touch, or smell that evokes memories of happy times, long past?
Is it a spiritual place that you believe you came from and will return to at the end of your physical life?
Is it even a place at all? Or, is it a person whom you feel perfectly safe with? Someone who doesn’t judge, but accepts you exactly as you are, flaws and all. Someone you can count on to be fully present in your life; who listens carefully and hears deeply beyond the words.
Could it be your own body, whose rhymes and rhythms are like second nature, requiring no further conscious thought or consideration.
Maybe Home is a combination of all these things, familiar and comforting, that give rise to feelings of joy and satisfaction. Perhaps the design is such that, no matter where you go in life, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, you can always find home…and peace.
Home For the Holidays
- At Christmas, all roads lead home. ~ Marjorie Holmes
As I finish up the Christmas to-do list today, I’m reminded of the holidays of yesteryear and the people who were such an integral part of those celebrations. Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, and neighbors, many of whom are gone now. If we live long enough, we begin to lose them one by one.
I was saddened to hear of two families back home in Pennsylvania that lost a family member this past week. One, my former hairdresser, was 52 years old. The other young woman, a close friend of my son, was 32 and fought a tough battle with breast cancer. She leaves a husband and young son. The Christmases of both these families will forever be overshadowed with the devastating loss of loved ones gone too soon.
I continue to make the adjustment to moving 1,000 miles from home and family is on my mind. I talked about this in detail in A New Kind of December. While I’m grateful to be spending Christmas with my oldest son, his wife, and my daughter, I’m missing the rest of the family back home. This is the first Christmas without my dad, who passed away last March. The holidays can be difficult for many people for a variety of reasons. Losing people is at the top of that list.
While all of these changes have me feeling somewhat blue, I’m grateful for:
- my family, even if I can’t be with ALL of them for the holiday
- that everyone is healthy and able to fully enjoy this time of celebration
- that we have the basic necessities to live a decent life
- that we have the opportunity to grow and change, when change is necessary.
That’s when it occurred to me: home isn’t so much a place as it is a spiritual connection to our past, memories, and the people who are/were a part of that. We can physically move far away from the place we were born, but the family history and connections always go with us.
Tonight we’ll call home and everyone will have a chance to chat with the added addition of Facetime on the iPhone and Skype on the computer. I still remember Bell Telephone’s 1964 long distance slogan, “It’s the next best thing to being there.” Times sure have changed, but like all good ideas, they remain relevant throughout the years.
Where we love is home, home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Following Seas 
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