The Dragon always enjoys an airplane ride, but when we arrived at a hotel in the midwest last week — instead of Grandma and Grandpa’s house in the northwest, as he expected — he was a little thrown off.
“I miss my hoooome!” he wailed. “Why aren’t we going hoooome?”
I started with the pat answer: “Wherever you and Daddy and I are together,” I told the Dragon, “that’s home.”
He looked doubtful. You just can’t fool a three-year-old. He wanted his bedroom, his toys, his stuffed orca that we’d forgotten. He wanted the cat, and going to get the mail, and routine. Familiarity.
So we explained a little about taking trips and assured him that we’d go home eventually. As we did, I thought of the basic structure of the horoscope chart, with home, memory, ritual and habit at the bottom, faraway places and new perspectives at the top. I thought about the ninth house up on high, the place where long-distance travel is implicated, and about stretching your mind and pushing out of your comfort zone.
After reassuring him, we talked to the Dragon about the value of experiencing new things, finding out how other people live, seeing different houses and streets and landscapes. A place with fewer people, more space; a place with lots of trees but no mountains. What did he think about not having a mountain in our backyard for a few days?
“I don’t know,” he said sullenly.
How did he feel about seeing a city he’d never seen before?
“I want to see the lights,” he said, referring to a family ritual of driving up the mountain at night to look out on the city. He was troubled when we told him we couldn’t do that here.
How did he feel about meeting a cousin his age who he’d never met?
“I want to,” he said, with a little more perk.
Aah, I thought, there’s his Libran energy emerging.
“You know,” I told him, “This hotel room will be home to us for a few days. This is where we’ll come to sleep, and play a little, and read books and talk at the end of the day. Even though we’re not home, we can make a little home away from home, right here.”
His three-year-old imagination was captured by that phrase: “Home away from home.” He kept repeating it throughout the trip. “Why are we making a home away from home?” he’d say as we rode the elevator to the lobby or got lost trying to find the train. “Why are we making a home away from home?”
And so he turned my mind back to the bottom of the chart, to the realm of home.
While on the trip, I read an article in Wondertime magazine about a family who traveled around the world for a year when their children were eight and 11 years old. I thought about that family, trekking through 28 countries, making little homes everywhere they went: the mountains of Peru, the deserts of Dubai. In the same issue, there was an article about Sukkot, the Jewish holiday in which celebrants build a temporary shelter to commemorate the structures in which their ancestors lived while wandering in the desert for 40 years.
It’s a natural human impulse to create a home — and to inspire a brief sense of it when far away. But how does that happen? And why?
The roots of the word “home” will not be surprising to anyone who has ever had one. Its stem, “tkei-,” meaning “to settle, to dwell, to be at home,” is related to words like “garden” and “situate” and has birthed several other words meaning, for example, “covering,” “village,” “haunt” and “to frequent.” It was these last two that really caught my attention. Of course we settle and dwell in a home; of course a home covers and shelters us; of course a garden and a village are close by.
But it seems to me that — despite pat statements about a home being love, or family, or where the heart is — what really makes a house feel like a home is that our frequency haunts it.
In physics and in life, “frequency” refers to the number of times something occurs within a given timeframe, for example the frequency with which we occupy a space: once per hour, once per day, once per year. In physics:
High-frequency electromagnetic waves have a short wavelength and high energy; low-frequency waves have a long wavelength and low energy. (Source)
It is not just our history, our families and our possessions that mark a home as ours. It is that we make it a frequent, recurring habit to be there. High-frequency visits increase the energy of a place for us. And when we are on the same “wavelength” as a person, a thing or a space (for example, our home) we feel comfortable there — even if we don’t like everything that happens in the place.
When we return home from work, or school, or the neighbor’s house, or a long trip, we download the energies of the day into the space we call home. Simply by being there, we imprint our wavelength onto the place. Our energies haunt the structure, seed it with our feelings, blossom — with repetition — into a certain sensibility that lives there even when we don’t: warm, or anxious, or loving, or sad, depending on how we haunt it. When we infuse our home with our own energy, its wavelength fits us. We feel we belong.
It is interesting, too, that the bottom of the horoscope chart is associated with short trips — commuting to work and borrowing sugar from the neighbors, for example — whereas the longer wavelengths of our lives, up at the top of the chart, tend to be less frequent, slower-going, with a wider perspective. Perhaps this is a reflection of the fact that we tend to slow down during vacation: We are trying to see a new place, to take it all in, to feel out where our frequency fits into the vibe of the new space. That we don’t get there as often means its energy patterns aren’t so deeply imprinted on us. It takes time to navigate our way through a new city, or up a mountain, or along the beach we’ve never seen.
And perhaps that’s also why that slower frequency is so hard to hold onto when we get home. The familiar is so because we practice it until we can do it in our sleep, with our hands behind our backs. We don’t need to think so deliberately. We can make the repetitive motions of the day quickly and by rote.
And yet — and yet. Even on vacation, we still need that homelike space at the end of the day, that space to return to again and again, larger than we were that morning but still comforted in the fact that familiar ground exists beneath our feet. Even in the midst of adventure, we need to feel somehow moored, to know that habit and familiarity still live within us, even as we allow the unfamiliar to engage us for a spell.
So after the pat answer, I finally found my bearings to say to the Dragon, “We’re making a home away from home because we all need a little familiar place when we’re far away from everything we know — a place we can curl up in like a blanket for the night.”
He seemed more satisfied with that answer.
Photo credits: Airplane, sukkah, light waves
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