Finding Home Podcast

Making a decision helps keep us present in the here and now.

Picking blueberries reminds me of a time when I was particularly happy. And nothing says home more than good memories.

The world would be a better place if we were kinder, gentler, and more honest with ourselves, as well as with each other. This begins with admitting we’re not okay. 

Who are we when an ancestor is written out of the family history and erased from the photos? Who are we then? What is home when some doors are locked?

While in Sambucca di Sicilia in February 2022, I fell in love with a home that fit my budget perfectly! Only, there is a problem. And my friend who is an architect says it's too big to fix.

Nothing else compares to losing your father because the role of Father is very unique.

You think Mother’s Day is just a celebration of women who birthed babies or raised kids? Think again. The origins of this special day may surprise you.

For May Day, Arbor Day, and Every Day - "I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree"

Wendell Berry's poetry is more salient this year than ever. In the midst of everything, participate in Spring. Practice resurrection.

Push past the winter blahs with these ideas for enjoying the little things and creating a home that makes you happy.

Just because you’re got at a job doesn’t mean you’re meant to do that job forever. Living a purposeful life where your work is a calling requires taking chances and starting over.

Whether you’re a power cleaner, a compulsive cleaner, or a daily tidy-upper, cleaning house doesn’t have to be complicated. But the best cleaning starts with two simple steps.

I discovered mold in my home last week, at first forcing me to let go of some things. But then I had a choice of what to keep and what to release. And choice is hard.

Whenever someone tells me "home is inside you," I cringe a little. That sentiment is far easier said than done. How, then, DO we begin to find home inside ourselves? 

A few days before my mom died, she told me, “I’m dying. It’s okay, I’ve seen that it is all okay.” My mother was going home. Going home to God. This is what she believed. As did my father, who died on Christmas morning. "O Jesus Christ, Thy Manger is my paradise." This is what he believed. My belief about heaven is different from theirs. But death, I do believe, brings us home.

To be tethered is to have roots. To be tethered is to be home.

The photo accompanying this episode is of Girl with Balloon by the artist Bansky. This artwork first appeared as graffiti in London and later was sold at auction for $1.4 million, after which it immediately began to shred through the frame and then stopped due to a malfunction. The partly shredded work sold last week at a new auction for $25.4 million.

Today we recognize the 574 tribes of Native Americans in the U.S. today and the millions who were here when we took their homes.

Spending time in nature is essential for our wellbeing yet even in a city park or our own backyard, we can be bombarded by noise. For me, the worst noise is a leafblower. Where do YOU find serenity in nature?

Chewing has become exhausting. I wish I had understood that decades ago when I made soup for my father.

Thomas Rhett has a new song where he says, “It sure is good to be country again.” I’m struggling to understand what that means. What does it mean to be a place?

We must be careful with our words and actions, even when we are frustrated, angry, fearful, or sad. Because children are watching. They are watching all of us.

Living – really living – is a perpetual act of suicide.

After a wedding, you are never really the same. Once we marry, a part of us is gone forever. Even as we embrace our new joined lives with joy and excitement, we need to honor what we leave behind.

When it’s time for assisted living, it’s not the home or their belongings that our elders miss. It’s the freedom and their youth. They don’t care so much if they are forgetting things, they have all the memories they need. Our parents are often more willing to move on than we know.

My own story of belonging is both different from and similar to Brené’  Brown’s. Since I didn’t fit in, I used my oddness to my advantage. That  worked for me as a kid but hurt me as an adult.

We all have a need to belong. In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, belonging is smack in the middle of the pyramid, right there with love. This is not to say the two are synonymous. You can certainly feel loved (by your family, a special someone, or a group) and simultaneously feel like you don’t quite fit. Yet feeling loved and feeling like you belong are key components to home, to feeling at home.

In this podcast, I discuss Brené Brown and her book Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging, in which she reveals one personal experience that she feels is the origin of her life-long sense of not belonging anywhere. Looking at her experience may help us understand our own and better understand our parents.

Musing on Henry David Thoreau, Walden Pond, Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature," and my time in a cabin in Sicily, outside of San Giovani Gemini.

Nostalgia forms when we long for a place and time created in our young minds, which may or may not have a basis in reality. What we are really mourning is not the loss of a better time, but the loss of our childhood.

There are a whole lot of moms who do not love their children as we expect mothers to and who do not provide the things a child needs to grow up feeling at home in the world. Some of these moms embody the Hera archetype, whose fulfillment comes from being married, not from being a mother. If Hera is the dominant archetype in a woman who becomes a mother, the children are bound to suffer.

John O’Donohue wrote, “The body is your only home in the universe. It is your house of belonging here in the world.”

A home must feel safe and be a place where we belong. But what if our body doesn’t feel safe and we’re told our body is not our own?

Things have changed a lot in recent years, yet the archetypes of Mother and Father remain. And the function of these archetypes is still important. Mother is the comfortable womb of home. Father disturbs that comfort. Father calls us out into the world.

Too often we create home based on what we’ve known and what’s familiar. But that’s not always what’s best. True comfort often requires us to move beyond the past. For the optimal experience in home and in life, we need to strive for the best.

“The place where you are standing is holy ground” (Exodus 3:5)

Home is a holy place. Bidden or not bidden, God is present. Our homes are an axis between heaven and earth. How can we remember this, celebrate this, and welcome the sacred and Divine into our homes every day?

Sometimes going home is wonderful. Other times, not so much. Each going home is filled with expectation and hope. If our visit is good, home burrows further into our hearts and psyches. And if it is not, home loosens its grip. 

Why does one place feel like home and another place, while beautiful or lovely, does not? This has everything to do with imprints: unique details that become embedded in our psyches and woven into our hearts when our experiences are significant and good.

We all wrestle with anxieties, fears, and insecurities but we don't talk about these things. Just like we don't talk about poop, unless we're joking.

Our hometown is always a part of us, even when we move away. It is almost part of our genetic history. Even if I never live in Chicago again, I'll always be, in some way, a Chicagoan.