Anyone who has ever grown up and moved far away will attest that doing so is strangely disorienting, since it throws the concept of home out of wack.

Surely, home could only ever be the place where your family is from (and still live), where your great-grandparents settled, where you’ve grown from pea-sized to college grad, where you learned to ride a bike, and a car, and had so many 3-way, sixth grade phone calls.

But spend long enough in a different place, and it, too, starts to bear the markings. You learn the roads (or the ones to avoid at all costs), and which shops have the best ice cream in town, and who to call if your tankless hot water heater stops syncing up with the in-floor radiant heating. You grow your business, and you buy a house, and a car, and the feeling of familiarity creeps up on you like age: the place you’re in, the place you live now, it feels a lot like a home does.

And the more you go back and forth between the two–between old and new–the more perplexing the dynamic feels, and the more intangible the concept of home becomes.

Is home there? Is it here? Are there two? Or do the two somehow cancel each other out to equal none?

Until eventually, you realize: home is neither of those places. Not really. Because home is not a place.

Home is not a geographical location you can spot on a map. It isn’t in a city. And while we can be at home in nature, nature isn’t really home.

Lovely as the concept seems, home is not found in another person, either. Our beloveds are touch points, not dwellings.

Eventually, you realize: home is in me.

Home is in my body.

My body is my place of origin, and my insides are my only true and most familiar terrain.

Within me is where I cultivate comfort, where I crave the ease of wellbeing, where I return to for safety, and to process the events of the day.

Home is not a place I leave or return to, but a feeling I take with me.

At home on the earth wherever I am.

At home with my family and friends.

At home in my work.

Home in me.

Home IS me.