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The comment I got from Diana last week really got me thinking about the word home. Why do any of us live where we do and when we move somewhere new, how do we make this new place a place of our own? There are so many phrases when it comes to the meaning of the word: “Home is where the heart is”, “My Home away from Home”, “There is no place like Home”, just to mention a few. When you really think about the word in these contexts Home is not just a location, it is a place in your heart, a feeling, a sense of being in the right place.

For those of us who have wanderlust and the travel bug and the need to go and see the world, does this mean that we don’t have a sense of home, or that we are looking for home? Are we are more nomadic than people who are born, raised, live and die in the same town, or even the same state? Why is it that some people move all the time and some are content to stay where they are?

These are the kinds of questions I have been asking myself, now that I am over the 6 month mark of our move to Florida. I have lived in a lot of places. I was born in PA, I lived in Delaware until 4th grade, then grew up in The Washington, DC area, lived in Norway before college, moved to Massachusetts for college, spent time in Arizona, moved back to Maryland, moved back to Massachusetts, moved to Vermont and now I find myself in Florida. When I list it all out like this, it seems to me like an awful lot of places. How has this happened? Is it just circumstance or do I choose this unconsciously? Perhaps I am looking for a certain feeling when I live somewhere that I recognize as HOME.

So what is home? What is that feeling I am pursuing? To me, home is where you feel secure, where you feel light and unburdened. Home is where you lay your head at night and where the people you love are. It is an energy and an understanding of being where you are meant to be in the cosmic sense. So if you are with family and loved ones, shouldn’t anywhere feel like home? For me, the answer is no. But I am not sure what the explanation is.

Sometimes I feel root-less. I wish at those times that I did have a place where my loved ones are, but that the place itself has that characteristic of home. Sometimes I wish I didn’t have so many choices about where I could live, but just lived and stayed in one place.

So when I move to a new place, I am always trying to seek out things I enjoyed about the last place I lived, and replace them with new versions. Sometimes I am not able to, and it makes me feel out of place. But I always try to find the best in a place, really search it all out and look for those hidden places that might have a whiff of that feeling of Home.

I do believe I will find that place someday, and until then I will keep searching the globe until I do. For now though I am happy where I am. I am having a great time exploring my new home state – seeking out all those places I still have to find, wondering if maybe one of them will bring me home.