Read at least 6 students blog short stories about ‘home’ and make a list of BOTH the common shared assumptions, values and stories that you find and look for differences as well; look to see if you can find student peers who appear to have different values then yourself when it comes to the meaning of ‘home.’ Post this list on your blog and include commentary please.
As I was reading through multiple blog posts about home, I found that there were many shared assumptions, values and stories. I also found that I shared most of these assumptions, values and stories. My lists are below and I decided to write a number beside each point as that was the number of times that association with home came up while I was reading.
Commonalities
- Home as not just a physical location (3)
- Home is the people around you who make you feel comfortable and loved (5)
- Home is changeable (4) – moving, multiple places at once (best friend’s house, parent’s house)
- The association of home with friendship (7)
- The association of home with nature (4)
- The association of home with experiences (5) – walking through a forest with damp shoes, childhood experiences on playgrounds or four-square courts, family vacations, something that evolves though experiences
- The association of home with senses (2) – the smell of a forest or river, the sound of rain, the smell of dinner cooking in the oven or a fresh pot of tea
- The association of home with comfort and safety (2)
- The association of home with stories and memories (4)
- The association of home with relationships (6)
- Home as a place within yourself (4) – community, togetherness, acceptance, freedom
- Home as the familiar (2)
- The link between home with culture and birth place (2)
Differences
- Home can depend on one’s awareness (1)
- The association of home with independence (1)
- The association of home with songs (1)
What I found interesting, as I was reading, was the different ways people approached talking about home. Some decided to talk about their physical homes first and then gave more detail about the experiences and feelings that gave them their sense of home. Some went directly into talking about home as something that cannot be defined as just a physical place. Some felt like they’re idea of home has changed over the years and some felt like it is still difficult to pinpoint what the word ‘home’ represents because we cannot change the place we were born or the experiences we have already had.
The differences that I found were that home can depend on one’s awareness (for example if you do not remember the first place you lived because you were a baby), the association of home with independence and the association of home with songs. I associate home with certain songs and I only read one blog post that also felt this way. I have never thought about home being associated with independence, but I enjoyed reading the blog post of someone who did. She talked about how she felt at home when she moved away on her own and that she could always make somewhere feel like home. I think the association of home and independence also leads to the idea of home as somewhere where you feel free.
I was drawn to a quote on Chloe Lee’s blog:“Home may be in another time and place, and yet it holds us in its power here and now. Home is like our language, compelling us to think and feel in certain ways and giving us the freedom to imagine other ways and other places. It is who we are and where we belong. Home both binds us and liberates us”-Chamberlin (76).
The quote stood out to me because I think it helps explain the difficulty in defining home. Home is so much more than just a place (to me) and the quote emphasizes this as it describes home as a combination of language, thoughts, feelings, freedom, imagination and more.
After reading through many blog posts about home I have realized that there are many similarities between our ideas of what home means to us. But I think that there is one main difference and that is that we all have our own individual story of how we came to find our meaning of home. We all have had personal experiences, friendships, and relationships that have shaped what we call our home.
Works Cited:
Lee, Chloe. “2.2 Home,” My Exploration of Canadian Literature, https://blogs.ubc.ca/470chloe/2016/09/28/2-2-home/. Accessed 3 Oct 2016.
