Home

I've lived in an old pre-war wooden house, various dormitories, parsonages provided by churches i've pastored, but i've never lived in a green house with a red exterior floor until now. i live on 1/4 of a quadruplex (is there even such a word?)- the one on the right is my home.

The search for a home is almost a constant need, an ache, a sorrow you have tried to assuage with so many things and in so many ways. And so wherever you might end up, your homing instincts would kick in and you start to build our homes. You make comfortable and make your own the spaces you have come to inhabit, even at the briefest of time. Almost always, you would put some personal touch to these places, be it a family photograph or some quirky work of art you’ve come to love and carry with you wherever you may go – all these to mark your territory. You want the place to reflect your personality, your sense of style. You want this space, sacred now because you have staked it for your self, to be a refuge, a home, and you take pains not only to draw boundaries as to what it yours, but to make it an extension of you. But it is not just purely out of aesthetic sense that you decorate, or personalize this space. It is not just for the sake of boundary-making that you mark off your territory. You do so for a deeper reason, and this is probably why the need for a home is so strong in each one of us.





The search for a home and the constant need to make you a home (or feel at home, so to speak) comes from a force so deep and so basic we cannot ignore it nor ever deny it. It is as fundamental as knowing why we exist, and it is as potent as the need to survive. And the reason is this: we all long to cry out to the deep, abysmal and very often mysterious world that we exist, that we are here. We exist! We are here! Identifying our spaces somehow assuage this need to be known. The need for home identifies us, homes would mark our existence – that in a world that seem abstract, something as concrete as our dwelling places objectify our presence. That we do not just pass through this time and space without a singular affirmation of our being. We are not absent from this world, and as long as we are here, we long to be counted, and we long to be made part of it. We are not invisible. For to exist unnoticed, unappreciated, unrecognized is a terrifying thought. And so our homes, the artifacts we find there, the personal touches we make are not merely empty halls or do they signify anonymous presences but point out our very own lives – that we have not fallen through the cracks of time and go about our feeble lives unnoticed, nameless, and valueless. We somehow mark our lives and the passing of time and the reality and the contribution of our presence through the spaces we inhabit.

And so we go about building homes, making it our own, reflecting our existence. It is a loud and a genuine assertion, we exist, we are here!


my niece on our small terrace. i plan to grow some sort of an herb garden here.