What It Means to be Home

Any baby bird understands the feeling, that irrepressible drive to leave the nest, and soar. Explore. And live.

But even after flight - even after fledging, and separation - even after moving on beyond the family's plume, that ingrained instinct to locate the safest branch for overnight roosting draws each and every bird to the same tree after every sunset chorus.

This tree, or cave, or building's eave, becomes the home base and niched place that promises security, comfort, and above all - perhaps most precious of all, safety... and familiarity.

My room is my landing pad.

I can recognize its sounds - its smells - the comforting sights and soothing designs of meditative importance and fandomatic promise cluttering the walls and opening the mind, always leaving the mark of comfort on my heart.

If only for a moment.

A single step alone, just barely entering beyond my darkened threshold opens the senses with the eternal fragrances of incense and wood. Soon the scent of white pine will join the incense and then its wintered rejuvenation will promise survival to a room and an Ice-soul just barely warmed in their sleep.

Even before that tentative entry - for visitors are often caught surprised by my warning sign, a gargoyle resting against the doorframe that warns, "Abandon all hope, Ye who enter here" - and then, contrasting, juxtaposing with ironically stark power, a gentle metalwork dove, golden and hanging just above that oracle of doom, its presence small and powerful, full of meaning. Free in its flight, and plume whirling just behind it in a swirling shower of glimmering peace.

It suspends on a ribbon of yellow iridescence, my thin and strong ribbon of hope.

Beyond.

It may take a moment for sight to adjust from the freely lit halls of the apartment to my shadowed enclaves and greytones.

I only have one single lamp, after all; its silver-blue elegance casts my room in a soft 60-watt glow of phosphorus and gold.

And the walls enclosing this delicately-lit space were once beige, pale cream, but I asserted my preference in posters and love by covering such dull and uninspiring emptiness with the people who've accomplished my dreams.

Perhaps you expected such a person of insanity to call the simple white-walled sanitarium home. In this darkness, you stand corrected.

Perhaps the walls already have ears, but what is there to hear? How rare to hear myself singing, chuckling, gasping and sighing at stories both ridiculous and profound as my fingers rustle the pages, gently flicking each corner-grasped turn with reverence each time I read.

I own several mirrors - but what is there to see? Each piece of glass is embedded within the gentle winding vines of a single iron leaf - not a mirror for vanity, but contemplation, spiritual and meditative all.

Its triple circles, sisters in support, uphold my values and belief. Upon their grounds rest needles and smudge sticks, all evergreen and wintersoul as I wind each packet with cotton thread, and placed a Guardian upon each shelf beside.

My Mother Mielikki, an altar I'm proud I've created.

Other decorations litter any open space available. Between my statues, my baubles, my still-enwrapped tokens of fandomatic fodder, my drying herbs, and fully empowered partners of paganistic pride, any random item is likely to rest upon these planks of lacquered wood; even visions of my own creations stand proud before my bookshelf, a depiction of a certain nonphysicality that I feel no words can describe.

Memorials - my darling doves, now passed, forever dear. A music note I'll never play and a poem from my father, with a canvas of cotton and fibers I hand-spun in an art class so many years ago. I never was such a brilliant painter. But depicting his image in colors of gold, proudly stanced among the gold columns I drew from the streets of Azarath, Fizzy will forever live on.

But nothing lurks so prevalently among the shelving shadows as my favorite possession of all: the books.

Hundreds of volumes, millions of pages, the craft of years and centuries old, knowledge spanning across the millennia spanning my shelves as every story from the most ancient of Celts to the most modern authors fills the dark-wood space.

It is a place of power, and a promise of peace.

Perhaps, some day, you will see.