Coming hOMe
it's not where your heart is. it's where you are.
Is it coincidence that OM is the dominant sound in the word home? Betcha didn’t know that every time you say the word home you’re micro-chanting. Yeah, I just made that up.
The etymology for home:
From the Old English ham
In Sanskrit, ham is a seed sound associated with the throat chakra. The sound promotes emotional balance and authentic expression.
From the German heim
From the Dutch heem
Hreem is a powerful Sanskrit bija mantra that represents the divine feminine and clarified intuition.
From Etymonline: from Proto-Germanic *haimaz "home," which is reconstructed to be from a suffixed form of PIE root *tkei- "to settle, dwell, be home." (emphasis mine)
In Sanskrit Om represents universal consciousness. It is totality, everything, unmanifest, brought into manifestation through the sound itself; sent back into unmanifest form in the final silence leftover when the resonance dissipates. The silence, too, is part of the sound.
To be at home feels balanced, authentic, divine, clear, settled, safe. A place where you can dwell. A place where you can be. Kinda like how it feels to chant Om.
The family home
Throughout my life, I have found refuge at home. My parents worked hard to create a structured, contained, and safe home-life for my sister and me growing up. I equated home and family with routine, cleanliness, organization, even fun. When at home with my family I felt protected from the uncertainty of the rest of the world.
My mom was born in a small town with one stoplight. When we’d get together with the whole family for holidays it wasn’t unusual for us all to sit around the table in silence—not uncomfortably, but content to methodically work through the seven desserts that seemed to define our reason for gathering. We were thankful to be in each other’s presence and had no sense of urgency or need to ask for anything more. We relished the simple joys of daily life. I didn’t understand it then but that small-town and its slow pace of life seeped into my bones. Simplicity, spaciousness, and contentment became an inner salve to counter the complexity, density, and heaviness of the rest of the world.
My dad’s family immigrated to the United States after World War II and worked hard to build a new and better life after surviving destruction, death, and loss. Their homes were taken from them, their families separated, their relatives killed, and their lives shattered before they landed on the shores of this country with nothing other than hope for a better life. They relied on a close-knit family and community to help them build it. My dad and his siblings craved and carefully crafted peaceful living—a direct, perhaps unconscious, response, I believe, to the inherited trauma of their parents’ past. What was familiar was safe and what was safe brought peace.
Contrast this organized, structured, simple, home life with my husband’s family. When I met his family, I immediately stepped into a world I had never known. People constantly walked in and out of the house. Young kids ran around shouting and screaming. In my house, my sister and I weren’t allowed to scream unless there was an emergency. I distinctly remember feeling something like horror when I realized my future mother-in-law prepared four dinners every night because every evening there was soccer practice, basketball games, hockey practice, play-dates, work, school functions, or something else going on that precluded the family from sitting down to eat at the same time. At my house, dinner was on the table at 6:30pm sharp every night.
I’ll never forget my first Thanksgiving holiday with my husband’s family. Tables were lined up next to one another spanning two rooms. People conversed with family members at the other end of the table while three other conversations happened simultaneously. The idea of assigned seating would have resulted in confused stares. To the unfocused ear, it was just noise. Before dinner, Grandpa Griffen spent what felt like hours corralling everyone together to play trivia games. People stuck around until after 10pm. There were no moments of stillness. No quiet. But there was a lot of good-natured arguing, laughter, joy, and only two desserts. My husband’s family marinated in a sense of contentment defined not by silence, but by exuberance. Thanksgiving wasn’t just about full bellies in his family. It was about the people, the conversation, and, especially, the games. Love and peace were their guiding principles too, it just looked and sounded a little different then what I was used to.
Creating my own home
As I ventured out to find my own place in the world, I slowly learned that my family experience was only one way for a family to live—one permutation of an infinite number of consciously (or unconsciously) curated group dynamics. I left my peaceful home and family and attended a university thousands of miles away in a city that was the polar opposite of my hometown. I unexplainably felt called by the foothills of the Rockies, lured by the magic in the mountains. Or maybe my eyes were just ready to see something other than flat land.
To cope with this separation from the familiar, I adopted and adapted my own routines, rhythms, and habits to re-construct my very own oasis. I kept things clean and tidy (generally speaking), committed to organization (everything had its proper place), and embraced silence (the TV was never on for background noise in my house). I worked hard to create a space to come home to where I could rest and rejuvenate. Home was my refuge away from what I was begrudgingly beginning to recognize as the natural messiness of the world that always existed outside my front door.
By carefully controlling my personal space, I could pretend all was in order. I doubled down on these space-control habits as my life started spiraling away from what I had always presumed was the natural goal of life—the attainment of a safe, steady state of put-togetherness and work-life balance that defines adulthood. My childhood tricked me into thinking the adult world—real life—was inherently calm. Yes, we have to work hard. Sure, people die and bad things happen, but the day-to-day is all okay if you put your toys away where they belong, sit down together as a family at 6:30pm for dinner, and get a good night’s sleep. Right?
My attempts at beating back the natural ways of the world suffered a significant blow when, one day, my then-boyfriend, now-husband informed me he planned on joining the military. I knew intuitively that military life was not conducive to my goal of calm living, steadiness, or safety and that my life would never be the same.
Seven states later in as many years and I knew a thing or two about finding calm amidst a storm of ever-shifting variables. They say home is where the heart is, which is, I suppose, another way of saying home is where you are. As the zip codes and landscapes changed more quickly than I would have liked, I learned how to find inner peace while constantly re-arranging my external oasis between four walls.
Coming back om
Calm is not found outside of yourself in the comfort of perceived perfection or inside a home in the particular arrangement of things. Quiet and stillness, in fact, are not even prerequisites for inner peace. Calm is constant, even in the midst of chaos. It is flexible, adaptive, and malleable. It is a state, but also a choice.
I still find peace, comfort, and joy in the presence of family, but my definition of family has expanded, as has my understanding of what calm looks and feels like. I still find peace at home, but I know that rooms, walls, doors, and kitchens are always temporary. And not always quiet. Joy can be found in the stillness of nature just before the sun rises and in the cacophony of family members and friends enjoying a meal together at sundown. These circumstances are not mutually exclusive and both can soothe the soul.
Also, I now have three kids. All my attempts at controlling my space have been abandoned, and yes, I held on tight and kicked and screamed and still revert to my old ways before remembering I don’t get to be in control anymore. I never was.
When my husband went back to school, we lived with my in-laws for three years. One day I stood in the middle of the kitchen, my son screaming in his high chair demanding more food. My father-in-law was on a conference call on speaker phone. My mother-in-law was having a conversation with one of her daughters while preparing dinner (she just cooks one meal now). My husband was in an argument with his other sister. Four conversations, two face-to-face, one over the phone, one less of a conversation than a whine for nourishment. And then there was me. Silent. Surrounded by noise. Overwhelmed.
I couldn’t escape. I was already home.
I felt my feet on the floor to connect with the grounding qualities of the Earth and took a deep breath to connect with my own inner landscape, the part of myself that is always safe, always blissfully silent, always at peace.
I’d like to say I belted out in a resounding Ommmmmmmm. I probably didn’t even chant it in my head. But it’s exactly what I needed. The reminder that home, OM, is with us always, no matter what is happening outside of us.
Not everyone feels safe at home these days. Some people may never have felt safe at home. Some people may not feel like they have a home at all, and some simply don’t have a home to come home to.
No matter your circumstances, despite the clutter and mess, regardless of the noise and distractions, may you always find your way back OM. In the depths of winter, may you find peace, warmth, and shelter within.
Your Practice
Chant. Hum. Breathe. Nap. Move. Tidy. Whatever it is you need to do to feel at home within yourself.
Reasons to Celebrate
February is the month to celebrate…
Black history
Heart health
Barley
Canned Food
Chocolate
Exotic vegetables and starfruit
Humpback whale awareness
Friendship
Jobs in golf
Avocados and bananas
Cherries
Embroidery
Fondue
Grapefruit
Haiku writing
Hot breakfasts
Macadamia nuts
Sweet potato
Returning shopping carts to the supermarket…?
Sunday, February 1
Imbolc
Hula in the Coola Day
National Baked Alaska Day
National Dark Chocolate Day
Monday, February 2
Groundhog Day (Also Hedgehog Day and Marmot Day)
California Kiwifruit Day
Crepe Day
National River Day
National Tater Tot Day
National Ukelele Day
Tuesday, February 3
Feed the Birds Day
National Carrot Cake Day
Wednesday, February 4
Farmers Day
Create a Vacuum Day
Medjool Date Day
National Homemade Soup Day
National Thank a Mailperson Day
Sweater Day
Thursday, February 5
National Chocolate Fondue Day
Optimist Day
World Animal Reiki Day
World Nutella Day
Friday, February 6
Bubblegum Day
National Chopsticks Day
National Frozen Yogurt Day
Saturday, February 7
National Ice Cream for Breakfast Day
National Send a Card to a Friend Day
Take Your Child to the Library Day
With gratitude,
Ashley