What is home?

This idea of home and belonging is haunting me at the moment. It's the theme for the webinars I will arrange for next year, so I guess I will have my curiosity sated.

When I was talking to the new boxing coach, he told me that all his family (except him) live withing half a mile of their grandparents in the same small town in the North East. We used to know people like that in Devon, but it's interesting that this is still pretty current.

I thought of the situation in Spain, where people talk of their "village", even if they have been living in a city for years. Their village is still, somehow, who they are, and is always home.

Modern life can have a deracinated quality, the cosmopolitanism that Kwame Anthony Appiah talks about. And there are without doubt huge benefits, in open-mindedness, tolerance and so on. But also, I suggest, something is lost.

There is such a difference between human migrants and migrating animals... how might we suggest it? That for the animal, the world, or at least the route and its two end points, all have the quality of home; while the human migrant has to make home.

And, as I sensed from the trees one day, I think that it's hard to feel the Earth is home if you don't live off the Earth and within its processes, as it were.

Modern life, in crowded Western nations, and in northern latitudes, uproots us in an existential way. We live as if on the Earth and perhaps within a human community, but we are seldom (ever?) fully part of a multispecies community. We, with our judgments, our ideas of right and wrong, our quest for power or at least control, certainty, reliability, our unwillingness to give ourselves over to the Earth.

Maybe we have lost the capacity to belong.