The O of Home on display at the Quaker center Photo: Photo: Trish Carn
The O of Home
Quaker author Jennifer Kavanagh's new book leads Trish Carn to consider what 'home' means to her
The O of Home by Jennifer Kavanagh. O Books. ISBN: 978 1 884694 264 8. £11.99 When I went to Jennifer Kavanagh’s launch of this book at the Quaker Centre I wasn’t sure what to expect. Home – how would I define it? Is it the flat above the Meeting house? Is it a place in the US where I used to live? Is it wherever I am with my family? I wasn’t surprised that Jennifer had looked at many sides of the question. She had worked with me in Quaker Homeless Action with the street homeless; she had worked with Quaker Social Action with émigrés far from their native lands, struggling to live in our country. But, she surprised me with the depth to which she had gone in exploring the variations on the word and then examining the reverse of the situation. With chapters on our bricks and mortar, our community, our borders and belonging and our planetary home, the book comes full circle: The O of Home.
Jennifer says: ‘In looking at the subject of home, we need to explore not just what it means for us as individuals, but also in the context of our communities, of our nations, and of our species. We need to consider not only what our outer houses mean, but those within.’
For me this led me to realise that if I am not happy in my own skin, I am not happy anywhere. Taking this idea further, outside bricks and mortar might shelter me physically but my soul needs a home as well. Looking at the reverse of what I would consider my home to be – with my husband, near my children – would be out on my own with no fixed abode. Many people live in this way, whether they are street homeless or refugees fleeing from something so scary that they need to leave their own place of safety.
Jennifer says: ‘Home is not static. Home is the balance between security and freedom; of belonging and longing. Home is both an end and a beginning.’
The O of Home made me think about and re-examine my own presumptions of home.
Some excerpts from The O of Home
A period of financial crisis, when much that we have held certain has been turned upside down, is a better time than most to challenge ingrained assumptions: not least in the context of ‘home’. Maybe it is a good time to wonder about our preoccupation with privacy and security or our view of community as an exclusive group of like-minded individuals; a good time to question assumptions such as the inviolability of borders and nationhood or the superiority of the human race; the notion that some groups of people are somehow different, lesser, ‘other’. Or that home is synonymous with four walls, investment, status and proof of identity.
We have the opportunity not only to look squarely at how things are, but also to dare to dream of how they might be.
Home is a central and emotionally laden concept. Sometimes it is a present reality. Sometimes it is a yearning for a childhood experience, real or idealised; sometimes it is a dream of something that has never been. In children’s games it is the place of safety where nothing can touch you; on a computer, it is the personalised place to which you can return. In dream interpretation, a house is often seen as a symbol of the self, and is a key to how we regard ourselves. Home is where we all want to be.
Family
We used to go to school with torn clothes and shoes, but we never laughed at each other because… that’s just the way it was. I didn’t have anything but I was happy. I could feel the love within our home. Everyday when I came home from school I could feel the love we had for one another. The way your parents raise you, how much love they give you, you feel this within yourself and when they hold you, you can feel the warmth and the love from their bodies. When you’re taken away from that it’s very hard (a Chiricahua Apache elder in Chapman, 26).
Homeless
Pavement is rock solid. Okay it’s cold and rough, but it’s reliable, it won’t reject or abandon you, it doesn’t… tell you that you’re worthless, it doesn’t leave you with tainted bruises, or acidic reminiscences. So here my roots can at last grow, filter through into the cracks and drop deep down into the subterranean, out of sight (Ephraums, 81).
My view on homelessness is that it is a state of mind. I meet many people in houses that are going through much more anguish than I am. They may be lonely, have mental health problems. Inside I am less homeless than a lot of people I meet (Walker, in the Big Issue).
On the move
‘People often say to me I must be mad to live a nomadic lifestyle by choice. It set me thinking just what are the advantages to this way of life, so I started to list them.’ This list includes ‘waking up in the morning to the birds’ dawn chorus’ and ‘badgers playing with cubs in the moonlight’. The downside, he finds, is the wholesale destruction of all kinds of animals and birds on the roads, in the quest for more speed. ‘So,’ he writes, ‘I’ve got news for you. I’d rather be mad in my home than sane in yours’ (Ephraums, 21).
Borders and belonging
If we accept that the world is home to every human being, that the boundaries we have created are artificial divisions in the human race; if we accept that the suffering of any one person diminishes us, what can we do to lessen that suffering? Inner and outer borders are created by possessiveness and greed. With global communication, we cannot fail to be aware, to be overwhelmed by the pain, poverty and injustice of the world. The inequality, both within nations, and between them, is an ever-widening gap. Can we in Western nations constrain our desire for more and more? Acquisition is not fulfilling but addictive; our yearning is without end. Can we bring back that infinite yearning, that yearning for the infinite, from its material expression to its proper spiritual dimension?
Borders are enforced by ignorance and fear. Only when we distance ourselves, fail to perceive another’s reality, fail to recognise the humanity of a fellow human being, can we ill-treat or exclude him, and consolidate our fear in repressive legislation.
An astronaut wrote of encircling the earth: ‘You look down there and you can’t imagine how many borders and boundaries you cross again and again and again, and you don’t even see them. There you are – hundreds of people in the Mid-East killing each other over some imaginary line that you’re not even aware of, that you can’t see. And from where you see it, the thing is a whole, and it’s so beautiful’ (Katz et al, 11).
Our sacred home
The Earth was small, light blue, and so touchingly alone, our home that must be defended like a holy relic. The Earth was absolutely round. I believe I never knew what the word round meant until I saw Earth from space (Aleksei Leonov in Vardey, 538).
