staying at home

For a host of reasons that you know all too well, many of us are staying closer to home. Job insecurity, stock market decline, rising energy costs, unstable food prices. Spending money on a discretionary trip right now feels expensive, if not downright extravagant.

So we forgo it, make do without and plan for next year.

But staying at home need not be the disappointing, second-best, self-sacrifice it sometimes is made out to be.

As a student of homes and how we live in them, I feel like it is time for me to come out of the closet. I like staying home. I like the way the house changes its pace and patterns when I am on vacation. And I like the way it teaches and changes me in turn.

Vacation schedules differ from work schedules, and our lighting patterns broadcast that. Lights in a house are like semaphores on a ship. The pattern with which they go on and off reflect the nature and purpose of the life we inhabit. We see this more in others than ourselves. An episodic change in the lighting habits of a neighbor often signals a celebration, a meeting, trouble, even death. A habitual change often signals a new neighbor. Changing our lighting pattern reflects a change in our habit.

So too in the use of rooms. The kitchen often enjoys more company on vacation as I learn to make new dishes, using both familiar and exotic foods (even locally grown foods can be exotic to natives depending on our food habits). Or the kitchen is abandoned as I seek to avoid all forms of domesticity and housekeeping.

My husband's paternal grandmother, a diminutive powerhouse of a homemaker, used to say it didn't matter where they went for vacation - as long as she didn't have to cook. (That was a difficult wish to fulfill for a kosher family in America in the early to mid-20th century.) For her, vacation was more a release from responsibilities, a liberated time allowing for a reconnection with and elevation of primacy of self than a discovery of others. I imagine that if her husband had hired a cook and cleaning crew to take over those chores every day for two weeks, despite her initial protestations (they would mess things up, they would break things, they would lose things, they would get in the way...), she would have been in heaven. (Though he might have heard some requisite fault-finding in their performance afterward.)

There is great spiritual power in the discovery of others: other places, other cultures, other foods, other habits, other ways of time, other kinds of flora and fauna, other use of natural resources. And travel is a prime way to experience that discovery.

But we often overlook the spiritual power of re-discovery of self, of home, of us in our place. There is so much we take for granted, overlook, never even knew.

Perhaps the unspoken gift of this time of increased at-home-ness will be this rediscovery of self and place. And with this rediscovery, a re-enchantment of self in place.

I am hoping over the summer months to publish several entries that speak to the discoveries and blessings we can encounter at home as we save fuel and energy and money by Staying at Home.

I hope to write about closets and neighborhood trees and home-spun entertainment and walking and all the sundry discoveries of the mysteries and hidden joys that we miss during the busyness of our lives.