Shirilevita

have to own up to it. Home isn’t necessarily, or even usually, signified by sweet memories and nurturing connections. Home comes with many faces. Sometimes home is where the hurt is. Sometimes home is the place where years of growing up take their toll rather than give you wings.
My family home on Wedgemere Road is where I came of age, plucking a ritual blossom from its honeysuckle vine out front when leaving for school each day,tasting the tender droplets on my tongue. It was the home where I spent the years of my adolescence, an often gray period of fluctuating hormones, nightly black-and-white images of the Vietnam War and growing disillusionment with government, as well as my own changing ideals to fit grown-up reaties. Remembering the simple battleship-gray house awakens little nostalgia.Within the walls of that home, many of my viewpoints began to diverge from those of my parents. For good or bad, it was there that I began to seek my own design for living—clumsy and bumbling, but nevertheless taking ownership for my personal experience in the world.
Home, after all, is the place we’re meant to outgrow. It is where, if we’re healthy, we leave the people through whom we have arrived on this earth—those who are meant to inspire us to find our own way. If home were always and forever sweet and nurturing, who would ever want to leave?
Find how comfort and home are colored for you:
• Ask, When has my home not been a comfortable place to be?”
• Think of how comfort speaks many languages: the acceptance of differences, ownership of what was, knowledge that what’s happened in a particular place does not have to impact what may be happening now (or for that matter the future), and
the re framing of how love looks.
• Note in your journal or on a piece of paper how home, family, and love express themselves in a myriad of different colors.Try to identify some of those colors. Name what they mean to you.

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