There's no place like home

Sometimes, being in a familiar place feels like you're wrapped up in a great, big, warm security blanket. Everything is comfortable and beloved and safe. There's nothing to discover but also nothing to be scared of, and you know all the shortcuts to get around town.

The Osho Tarot says that "home isn't a physical place, it's a sense of security in ourselves." I agree and disagree with that. I think home can be both, a knowledge of yourself that lets you be at home wherever you are, and a place where you feel so right in the world that there's no doubting anything. Maybe that sounds naive or utopic, but isn't that the nature of home, or at least why it can be comforting? Home is where there's nothing left to run from.

Which is why the following passage from Ann Packer's novel The Dive From Clausen's Pier stuck with me:

I'd been swinging back and forth between staying here and going back---swinging without even thinking about it all that much because thinking couldn't really help me choose as well as seeing could: my clothes, here. My life, here. Was this it? I was still swinging back and forth, though I imagined a moment would come when the swinging would change: no longer a movement between choices, but a movement into memory and regret, and back out again.

**UPDATE** Dawn from Buffy the Vampire Slayer is going to play the lead role in Lifetime's Version of The Dive From Clausen's Pier. Aieee. Do you ever get an image in your mind of how a book's characters should look? Dawn was not what I pictured for Carrie. Maybe Alison Lohman, but definitely not Michelle Trachtenberg.