Finding home
Or...can you really learn to love where you live?
This essay was prompted by a beautiful piece written by
of the Unwind Substack. As with so many of Mansi’s essays it is really thoughtfully put together and has so much to resonate with.
It got me thinking about the word home and what it means to be home.
For me home is the countryside where I grew up - the stone walls, the curlews swooping in the fields, the expansive moorland.
Never mind the fact that I grew up in a small red bricked semi-detached house in a rather depressed northern town. We got out into the countryside at every opportunity - the hills were literally on our doorstep - and I always feel at home among hills.
The fact that I have somehow ended up living in the the flattest part of the UK is a source of perpetual bemusement. 🤣
I’ve lived on the Essex/Cambridge border for 25 years, longer than I ever spent living in the northern town that I was born in - and yet it has never felt quite like home. Yes, I have raised my children here. I have worked, lived and laughed here. But it still isn’t home.
I don’t feel at home until I am north of the M62. Until I can see stone walls, expansive views and hills in the distance. I just don’t.
I have really tried to ‘#love where you live’, I really have.
I have explored every inch of my adoptive county, and it really is pretty nice, but I’ve come to the conclusion that it won’t ever feel like home.
I holiday a lot in the Lake District and there is a breed of sheep native to that area called the Herdwick - or Herdie for short. They are adorable and very distinctive with their smiley faces and changing colouring as they get older. If you want to know a little more about this most charming of sheep I have a link to an older blog post of mine here.
One of the most notable things about the Herdwick breed is the characteristic called Hefting.
Simply put each sheep has a unique connection to the landscape into which it is born. It’s a set of learned behaviours and instincts passed onto each sheep through it’s mother that enables it to survive in a harsh and uncompromising terrain. A sheep will know instinctively where to seek shelter when snow blows in from the west, or where the best grazing will be found after a spell of prolonged rain.
Their knowledge is hard won and essential for survival - and importantly is specific to the fell on which they were raised. If they are moved just a few miles into a different valley with a different micro-climate they won’t thrive at all as their incredibly specific knowledge is of no use.
I find this process fascinating and have long thought that it applies in some way to humans as well.
We can’t help but remain connected to the place we were born into. The experiences, the places, the people. They all come together to create a specific unique environment that to us, just spells home.
This is No. 8 in a series of Essays for the 24 Essays Club hosted by Claire Venus
Other posts in this series include:
I SO identify with this! I’ve lived here for 28 years, raising my family in the interior of “beautiful British Columbia”, and it’s not home. I truly get how gorgeous it is here, but all the magnificence has often been just one more thing I found overwhelming.
I’ve done much to ‘bloom where planted’, and have a better relationship with the land now, but I was born into the mystic landscape of lakes and rocks and windswept pines that is Northeastern Ontario, where the water welcomes.
In 28 years, I’ve been home 3 times. And the last two, while I still loved my favourite spots, didn’t feel the same. I have Facebook friends in the UK, and for years now the view from their windows or pictures of their morning walks take my breath away. I long for it as an ancestral home, perhaps? The home of my heart?
Iona certainly felt like home when I visited there!
A revelation that helped me carry on in the painful decades when my environment felt hostile is that my body is my home.
I am always at home, if I’m at home in my body. I never have to leave home, if my home is my body. I always belong, if my home is my body.
To me, this has been empowering.
(This opens a whole kettle of fish about the engineered antagonism women are expected to feel about themselves, but that’s for another day!)
I wonder if you’ve read The Shepherd’s Life by James Rebanks. I’m guessing you might have but if not I think you’d love it - a beautiful homage to Herdwick farming in the Lakes. Home is a funny one isn’t it. I’ve only lived in the South West for 3 years but already it feels much more like home than the South East where I was for 30 years. And then before that I was in North Yorkshire for just a handful of years but that still feels like my second home. It’s definitely a heart led feeling.