Responses to “Home” (2:3)

I really enjoyed this assignment—both writing what home means to me and reading what home means to my classmates. I think that it is a great way to get to know other students (which is especially useful, given that an online blogging course doesn’t really aid to the whole “socializing in class” thing) and to reflect on our own lives outside of school.

With that in mind, I was surprised as to how similar everyone’s views on home were. I don’t mean that in a “everyone comes from the same place” sort of way. Everyone thought about their home differently: some students, like Whitney Millar, wrote about the places they’ve lived and how exactly one goes about making a temporary house into a home. Other students didn’t focus as much on the places that comprise a home, but the people, and I thought that Jamie King’s tribute to Harry, a technical director at a farm in the Okanagan, was especially powerful and very well done.

Some students, such as Charmaine Li, blended this experience and found a middle ground. Charmaine’s blog post talked about the idea of home and how it relates to others; in her case, she discussed the experience of living on the traditional and unceded homeland of the Musqueam people and how it shaped her sense of “home”.

While these three blogs, and the countless others that I browsed, all approached the topic of “home” in their own unique ways, as one would expect people from vastly different backgrounds and lives to do, there was a thread of similar sentiment that stitched all of our works together: home is not necessarily a physical space, but instead is comprised of the people and memories that make it feel familiar and comforting. The knowledge that no matter where you go, you can find a sense of home, is ultimately a driving force in why humanity evades stasis. I think this blog assignment was a great reminder that even though everyone operates in different ways and lives their own unique experience, we all have some of the same basic wirings below the surface.

I’ll conclude this with the quotes that resonate with me from each of the blogs. Thank you to the three bloggers I was able to read and respond to!

-“When it comes to my personal ideas of home, there is a sense of shared experience that creates a space rather than a permanence of location” (King “Home. Yes, we are home”)

-“I’d like to think that as long as you’re free to roam the wooded trails and breathe the ocean breeze, you are home” (Li, “A Home with Many Adventures”)

-“For me, coming home is about the rediscovery of the familiar, while not feeling at home is about being uncomfortable and unfamiliar” (Millar, “Let Me Come Home”)

 

WORKS CITED

King, Jamie. “Home. Yes, we are home.” English 470A: Oh, Canada. UBC Blogs. 05 June 2015. Web.08 June 2015.

Li, Charmaine. “A Home with Many Adventures.” Canadian Yarns and Storytelling Threads. UBC Blogs. 05 June 2015. Web. 06 June 2015.

Millar, Whitney. “Let Me Come Home.” Whitney ENGL 470 Experience. UBC Blogs. 05 June 2015. Web. 08 June 2015.

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