For, what is home? Surely more than a set of rooms, a roof, an address? Home suggests belonging. Suggests warmth, safety, companionship. Love.

Home is a concept. It’s one of a story that we cling to so deeply. When your home has been really, “here is my couch, here is my this, here is my that,” it becomes like mine. For me, home is where people who are loving are. It could be on the street. It could be inside of a tent. It could be in a place where they’re not given a land, then that is a place called a slum. It could be in the high rises of New York or in the middle of chaos in Mexico City. And the physical piece of a home is so important, especially when the weather—sun, cold—is against you…

Home is a sustained mood or sense that allows us to experience feelings not necessarily sustained in the mundane world: wonder, vision, peace, freedom from worry, freedom from demands, freedom from constant clacking. All these treasures from home are meant to be cached in the psyche for later use in the topside world.

The definition of a home: you are happy when you leave and you are also happy when you return.

"what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto." (p123) Architecture of Happiness

Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.

Yes, this was his home. Here no harm could come to him. He smiled at the mere idea that any harm could come to him here. He avoided looking at the divan on which he slept. Every human creature needed a home, not a home of the kind understood by crude knock-you-down patriots, not a religion either, a mere insipid foretaste of a heavenly home: no, a real home, in which space, work, friends, recreation, and the scope of a man's ideas came together into an orderly whole, into — so to speak — a personal cosmos. The best definition of a home was a library.

Home for me is about safety and embrace. It's about shedding all the external masks that we have to wear out in the world. Home is really about beauty, safety, history. My friendships are home for me. My family is home for me. It's an energetic connection that creates a sense of safety and groundedness, where I don't have to wear any mask. I can just be myself.

Usually, home is associated with a physical space, whether that is a building, neighborhood, town, city, or country; sometimes all that comes to mind are the four walls of a room. Home is where, when you walk in the door, you recognize the smell of clean clothes, stir-fry, or the scent of a field of wheat. It's the light that shines through the window each night, casting familiar shadows. It's waking up in the morning and walking around without needing to turn on the light. For me, however, all of these feelings are scattered since my home is a collection of specific spaces that make me feel good when I'm in them. I walk around La Cerdanya and suddenly feel at home, but the illusion disappears in the blink of an eye. I go back to Chamonix and the smell of fall welcomes me — I feel at home, but the spell is soon broken. In Nepal, too, the relaxed feeling of home sometimes takes hold of me for a moment. I can often feel more like I'm in my own place in some unknown country than when I'm in the house I've paid for and made my own, where some days I feel like a total stranger.

Home is where the heart is. Home is the quality of presence. It’s the quality of being. Home is always here.

Home wasn't a set house, or a single town on a map. It was wherever the people who loved you were, whenever you were together. Not a place, but a moment, and then another, building on each other like bricks to create a solid shelter that you take with you for your entire life, wherever you may go.

Home is collecting stories, writing them down, and retelling them. Home is writing, and it grounds, sustains, and nourishes me. Home is the page. The one place I always, always come back to.

Home is a symbol of the self. Caring for a home is caring for one’s self.

Home is understanding and being understood.