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Writer's pictureIvana Petersen

Home is…

A blog post that I have been writing in my mind (and my hear) over several years






I might be finally ready to put some words about the whole concept of home. I say finally as I did contemplate about it a lot.


I wonder if people even think about it, like ever, during their life time.


I didn’t, not before I actually left for the first time, everything that home was to me to that point.


It was 2008 and I was madly in love with my husband - so in love that I didn’t bother even to consider what it will do to me to follow him and live permanently in Denmark (his home country).


I came openhearted but very little aware of what it will do to me. I had love with me and for me that have had to be enough.


It was, to some extend. You see, I am undeniably big romantic but even for those of us who blindly believe in power of love, at some point the reality hits hard: love can many things but then again you will need more.


What it was “more” I didn’t have any clue. You see, I have saying how we often can’t really truly understand the importance of and the impact of what we have in the moment we have in. Often, we first truly understand those when we remove ourselves from it. In the light of something new in the present moment, we gain a new insights and digest what has been - we might even feel some new emotions and let them sink deeper in our bodies.

One day, those emotions might come back, bringing us closer to what it was.


I lived my whole life in the same house where I was born and grew up. I moved in my twenties to go study in a capital city that was only an hour away. I would go “home” to my parents often in those years, revisiting what I well knew by that point.


As 24 years old, leaving a country for the first time, to live abroad, brought a whole lot of learning: I was not just leaving my country, I was leaving the home - whatever home was. I was also leaving “my” people and in a way I left myself behind too.


I wanted to fit in in the new country and culture. I wanted to be integrated - not knowing what price that comes along with.


So I tried very hard to redefine myself according to what I believed was wanted. For many years I must have been lost in that search and the home was never more far away than there.

I anchored myself in my partner and later in my kids and I truly believed that they could hold me on the surface of this sail through the life.


The very first years in Denmark have been the hardest period of my life. It had left many wounds and scars - mostly because I was so very lonely not being able to find deep connections and bonds but also for abandoning myself in that search.


Two years after I moved, we bought ourselves a lot and built a house - I will find that home-a like. I even had an idea that we would grew old there and live our whole life in that house.

But the house wasn’t a home, you see. And as beautiful as it was and cozy, warm and safe it was, it became a burden. It was the place where my loneliness increased and I felt how over a years my unsettlement grew together with the guilt of not being the mother and the wife I wanted to be.


Life was good on the surface, but deep inside of me I had so many battles in the years to come. All the way until we sold our house and decided to “try something new”.


That new ended being so much we never even thought about. It became 2 houses, many moving in and out, traveling and more traveling. At the end we came back to our first house to make a full circle around and finally find our peace in letting go: mostly it was letting go the idea that a house is a home.


It can be, but it wasn’t for us.


3 houses we had gave us learning, insights, struggles and happy moments. They were places where we shared some special memories: our kids births (one even being in one of our houses on the kitchen floor), their first steps and giggles, Christmas around the kitchen table, many moments of laughter with those we love, uncountable cups of coffee, renovations, decision taking, discussions and growth in so many ways.


Our houses have been homes - for some time and in a certain ways.


But not THE home.



You see, to have a home, you don’t need a house - you can have one (or many) but to have a home you need the essence of home. And confusing enough often that essence is placed in the house and therefore we believe that house is the same as our home.



I asked myself so many times over last many years (we have been moving around extensively since 2021) where do I feel home?


And I felt home in most unusual places: places that were not even “ours”, places we shared with others, places we stayed shortly or just visited for a while, places that were not even buildings, places that were not even places.


Let me elaborate: I feel home when I feel alive in myself.


And how I feel alive, can be different than how someone else feels alive. I feel alive when I know who I am and how I want to be: and that changes too.


I feel home more than ever, last couple of years since I started my inner journey and healing - I learned about my conditionings and traumas, triggers, emotions and body and heart wisdom. Slowly on my inner journey over last 5 years I moved closer to my true self. And the first moment I felt alive in my own body, I felt truly at home.


And that home didn’t have anything to do with a house or a place. It had to do everything with me.


When I share that “place” (and I call it a place in a lack of a better term) with others, it is there that true magic of home comes alive.

That’s why I truly felt as home moving around and coming back.


Home is Croatia and Denmark, and Australia and Vietnam and Guatemala and DR….But home is also all those people that holds that feeling of home for me.


It can be a moment I share with someone over a cup of coffee or tea, a smile, a kind word, a way someone look at me, it can be an adventure we move together on, it can be coming in someone else’s home and meeting missing peaces of your own comfort and safety.


Home are rituals, smells, goosebumps provoked by a  melody or a scent, home is simplicity and slowness and sunshine and rain. Home is more than walls and windows and furniture but home can be moved in those.


At the moment, while we are pet sitting for the 3rd time in Australia, the house we live in has the same coffee machine as we had. The sound of the machine being turned on brings home to me again. When I look through the window and meet the green from the outside, I feel home too. So I do step into that “green” to meet myself again. And there it is again the home I know.


It moves with me. It evolves with me. It changes and modifies and sometimes I feel it less or more.

Sometimes I need to go back to what I did relate with a home concept to remind my self of it’s borders and shapes, forms, but mostly feelings.


So much feelings.


Home is what we make it to be - either physically or internally. It is what we want it to be for us self. But in my book it should always have some hints of belonging and comfort, joy and meaning.

From there you can leave it or bring it with you. You can shape it and place it (firmly and steady on the one spot, if you wish that too) or take it somewhere else.


Home should be your self and truly belonging to who you are.


And then it can be everything in between and so much more.


At the moment, my home is the remembrance of what we had and what had nurtured us for many many years: connections, smell of fresh baked cake and first grained coffee in the morning, it is the smell of spring in the air, and the sound of autumn in the trees, it is a puzzle master piece in the making, an excitement over a brand new cookbook, sizzling sound of the dinner cooking on the stow and the boiling water in the kettle at the late evening, it is a sound from a dear friend in a distant country sharing my excitement over a phone call, it is my mothers kind words expressing the same feelings that my own heart carries too…


Oh, home - you are good to have and take along whenever we feel lost and discouraged and distracted.

You are undeniably a true anchor we all need to feel we belong in our inner ever-changing landscape.


Without losing my home, I wouldn’t be able to find it again.


I will still go and ask myself where it is and sometimes I might even notice again that we don’t have one at the given moment but I do feel that I will always be able to find it again as the home I believe in, is never very far away from who we truly are.


The one home we do know is the one being in us.

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