HOME

Once upon a time there was a call, a call to go home. Home not as a place, not as a relationship with someone else, but with oneself. Home as a state of being.

Going home is a prominent motif in literary works as well as modern-day films. Whether it is the biblical prodigal son who decides to go home one day or The Kite Runner’s Amir returning to his native Afghanistan, there is something incredibly powerful about the journey home.

Home can be many things – a refuge, a place of joy and sharing and being who one is. It can be a place of serenity, challenges, heart-breaking and heart-binding, of growth, warmth and love. Among other things that is what home is supposed to be. For many home is anything but that which is why it is so incredibly damaging when our home is a place in which we fear, are stunted in our growth, in which we are betrayed, unseen, neglected, mistreated, unloved. We speak of home as a place where we have our roots, and so we speak of going back to our roots in one way or another. What do we mean when we say these things?

Home as a state of being is being deeply at peace with oneself. The journey home takes a while because life is messy and it is not an easy journey. Coming home is being free to be who you are, in your own skin, and in the ‘skin’ of the presence and community of others.

We usually associate home with a building, a particular house, a town or a general geographic region. But what happens when you lose that home? What happens when you can no longer live where you physically anchored your Self? (much could be said about displacement here) Who are you then? And how does one go home, especially if it is not a place but a state of being?

Homer’s hero Odysseus is off fighting the Trojans for a decade, and in the end he is victorious. It then takes him another decade to finally go home to Ithaca (an island in the Ionian Sea). By the time he returns home he will have been away for twenty years. His journey home is treacherous, he encounters numerous obstacles and both his inner and outer strength are tested many times.

The story ends well because he does finally return, there he finds his faithful wife and his family and all is well. Why are we exploring this? Odysseus is not unlike Jonah, of whom we spoke last month. Jonah descends into his Belly in order to become his best, whole Self; in order to be and accomplish the unimaginable. Odysseus undertakes a dangerous journey to return to who he is and where he belongs, to come full circle. But the path to Ithaca leads through Hades. Hades is the ruler of the underworld and he governs the realm of the dead, the place no one ever desires to go of their own free will. Hades is a place in which mortals cannot see, they are blind. It is not obvious that Odysseus’ will come out alive; his very being is tested. Has he been to his Belly? Does he have what it takes to pass through Hades and finally arrive home? Odysseus not only manages to visit Hades alive but very importantly, he is also able to see in its darkness. There is something about the kind of person that Odysseus has become that has made him strong, of substance, and it enables him to conquer even the greatest of terrors, traverse the most perilous of terrains.

The path to Ithaca leads through Hades. So what is Ithaca? It is a mindset, a state of being. Ithaca, home, is coming full circle within oneself. It is who Jonah is as he emerges from the Belly. Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy understood this when (inspired by Homer) he wrote his well-known and beautiful poem Ithaca. Ithaca is home, yes, but not as a place, but as a journey of becoming. Yes, we come full circle, but it is who we have become that closes the circle. It is a journey in which one manifests over and over again who one has become, who one truly is on the inside, even when faced with engulfing darkness. In that sense home is a string of events, choices and postures of the heart that come to shape and make you who you are. Home is who you are when you have been to your Belly and have come through the other side. Home is to breathe filling the whole of your lungs. Home is a deep joy and sense of being fully aligned with oneself and in the world. Home is to have come through the unthinkable and to know you walk on solid ground. Home is to be whole, to be well. Home is the fruit of the Belly.

This is why the call home is so powerful.

This is why the journey home is so treacherous.

 If home is the experience of having come through one’s Belly, then it is obvious that to descend into one’s Belly is an enormous, difficult and painful undertaking. Not everyone chooses to descend, not everyone comes through the other side, which means not everyone comes home. Many get lost on the way, grow disheartened, embittered, numb. Despite our physical homes, the home of our childhood, or adulthood, whether they were good or bad, what of our inner home? What will we do with our inner home and the call to return? Ithaca is a call to return to who we truly are and all we could be, no waffle, no kitsch, no confetti. I wonder, of all the journeys worth undertaking, is it not the journey home…?

(c) Belinda É. Samari

For more on Odysseus’ journey to Hades cf. Homer and the Poetics of Hades by George Alexander Gazis.

Click here to listen to a live recording of a piece I composed for a project a few years ago encapsulating Odysseus’ Ithaca.

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