Nest building
One of the most loaded words I know, is ‘home’. It has a weight and significance to it that surpasses almost all others, for me. The role of the home in day to day functioning is critical. Our addresses are a key part of our legal identity, something I’m acutely aware of having spent a couple of years with mail c/o the Post Office. Home contributes to our social identity, roots us in a geography, connects us to ancestors of land. The space is expression of self, and the people we share it with are normally the people we are closest to.
To be absolutely certain about where home is, and what it constitutes, is to know where you fit and to feel centred. That’s not necessarily about owning a place, it can be more to do with relationship with a landscape, or connection to family. Home might be where your ancestors are buried, where your language is spoken, or where you cat is. We each have our own definitions, some more consciously held than others.
Shelter is one of the most basic things, and the certainty of knowing you will sleep securely tonight is an important one. Many people don’t have that. Benefit cuts and soaring rents are pushing ever more people in the UK into states of uncertainty. Living a transient life is fine if you’re a wild spirit called to wandering, but many people aren’t. The loss of geographical identity, or social and legal identity around loss of place, is really intimidating. If you are not secure in your home, you may not feel very secure in anything.
In the quest for social status and profit, we build ever larger dwelling places that most people cannot afford to buy or run. I’ve become enchanted with the relative simplicity of living in smaller spaces, working out what is most needed and paring down to that. Compared with many people in the world, I have phenomenal wealth and property. Compared to many westerners, I have very little.
Our security is not what it could be. Any one of us could face compulsory purchase for some big infrastructure project. It could become legal for companies to frack under our homes. Laws and by-laws influence what we can do. In this property I am forbidden from keeping chickens. In a previous location, goats were not allowed for some reason. An Englishman’s home is his castle mostly in the sense that we all get to wonder who or what is poised to stick explosives under our walls.
Perhaps because we crave security, we get the biggest home we can and we fill it with stuff, as though that stuff forms a real barrier between us and the world. Pile it high enough and they won’t be able to take it all away (whoever ‘they’ are). Be that piles of old newspapers, or more cars than we can drive, or a kitchen full of unused gadgets, their weight and solidity promise to help keep the scary things at bay. Except that it doesn’t, and more things must be acquired to protect the things already acquired and then you need more space, and it never ends. Sometimes it feels safer when you know you could pack it all up and move on within a week, if you needed to.
What does home mean to you?
