Making Sense of Home

To belong is one thing. To feel expelled, kicked out of heaven, is another. I wonder sometimes, how did Adam and Eve really feel when they were sent away? We never got their point of view. What happens when you are cast aside, away, for one sin? How do people ever heal from that? I doubt humanity has ever healed. We are still striving to find that home again. There is a permanent state of homelessness, one that cannot be eradicated, eased, or forgotten. In everything we do, through all of our actions, thoughts, desires, lacks – there is the sense of being haunted. There is a deep desire to go home, wherever home might be. Home differs for all of us. It doesn’t have to be family. It doesn’t have to be friends. It doesn’t have to be even your own self or your body. Home can be adaptable, changeable – it can be related to a nomadic lifestyle. And yet, home can also be a delusion.

Perhaps the desire to create a sense of belonging is so strong, there is always a desire to return home that the mind can create a reality that suits one’s needs. The mind is fascinating in its ability to adjust to trauma, and in its ability to reconstruct reality. Part of my research has been invested in Madness Studies and the mind’s intricacies, but I can still safely say I know nothing about the mind. On that note, the Oxford conference on ‘Making Sense of Madness’ should be quite interesting. Scholars from all over the world will come together to attempt to make sense of a senseless state. How can the mind be so powerful, and yet so weak, as to absorb whatever it is fed as “reality”?

And that’s all for now.