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April 9, 2020

Thursdays with Woli | Home

Ed Tait asked me if I’d be interested in writing weekly for the Blue Bombers website. My response was, “Can I write about anything?”

I think I frightened him with that.

But here I am, happy to be.

This week I want to dive into a subject that has been weighing heavily on my mind, as I’m sure it has for many others out there, living through this pandemic with their families. That subject is ‘Home’.

The sight of that very word may prompt a specific feeling inside of you: happiness, frustration, nostalgia, anger, sadness.

What is home? Why do we strive to make it? How do we find it? Where does it go?

I was grocery shopping the other day with my mother, Audrey; facemasks, gloves, the intercom continuing to reiterate the six feet of separation we should be keeping in the four-foot aisles. Grocery shopping has become an extreme sport.

As we were grazing the shelves, I couldn’t help but sneak in some snacks – Goldfish, candy, some root beer, trying to conceal it under the carrots and bread. Of course I got caught. The whole point is to get caught. It has, and always has been, a little game between mother and son, seeing just how much I can get away with, pushing the button to see how far it goes.

It reminded me of my youth, of those early days when I slept soundly on lazy summer afternoons, listening to droning mowers cut lawns, smelling the fresh-cut grass through the window of my room.

Home was peace.

But peace doesn’t last long.

I grew up, my bones grew (sometimes broke), home was tested with tribulations, internal battles, external economic collapse  – sound familiar? – and suddenly home was not a place I went to for peace. It felt different, I felt different. I went to college.

I did not find home there either, no matter how hard I tried. That feeling just would not return. I was sad. I began writing.

I had theories: home was simply being a child. It was blissful ignorance, and now that free-spirited feeling did not exist anymore and that crushed me. Home must be temporary, I thought, and then it grew old and dusty and went deserted.

My parents moved out of my childhood home. I never said goodbye to it, whatever that looks like.

When I returned from college I drove by the old house and it looked completely different. It had a hair change, got a nose job. I felt no recognition to this long ago lover, felt none of that ‘home’ that I had expected.

I realized that home has little to do with place and circumstance, or even people—many will argue me on this, but hear me out.

During this quarantine I have been FaceTiming with my brother, Nathan, who had his first son about eight months ago. I became an uncle and I never expected to find so much joy in it.

I watch little Johnny, my nephew, on the screen, drooling all over, grabbing onto objects and putting them into his mouth, looking at things with such fascination that most of us look at and don’t think twice about.

Johnny has what we all once had. An immense love for the world around him. He doesn’t know what love is, or curiosity, yet he has both and they are untarnished by intelligence or categorization. He is experiencing everything, seeing it for the first time, every time.

Something sparked in my mind.

An answer presented itself to a question I’d been holding onto for so long. It said: Home is when we are love.

I don’t mean it is when we are in love. I mean home is when we are love.

I would describe this as when we have an unbiased, unprejudiced relationship with the world, like a child. Like we did when we were children.

We have all felt a moment like this in our adulthood. Maybe it’s felt in the presence of friends, of lovers, standing at the top of the Swiss Alps, rowing a boat on Lake Winnipeg. When we find ourselves in a state of ‘being’, when the present becomes visible.

It is the moment where everything is there for us, where we look at things with new eyes, and share a silent communication with life. It comes down to this: Our lives are a manifestation of what is inside of us. I am reminded of a verse from Matthew that states:

Ye shall know them by their fruits…
A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit,
Nor a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.”

Home, it turns out, is a body. But it does not belong to somebody else, can’t be found in things or borrowed from others. Home is the body that is ours, and the home we create is entirely dependent on the goodness we have inside.

We can be anywhere in the world, and we can feel at home.

With all this time on our hands, I challenge you to look at something that you have seen thousands of times, but to see it with new eyes, as though you’ve never seen it before. Free your wonder to come out and experience the world.

There is always goodness around us, so often drowned out by the fears pushed onto us, distracting us from that wonderful place we know is Home.