There’s a German word that captures the feeling of home perfectly for me: Geborgenheit.
It’s often translated as “safety,” but that word feels too small. Geborgenheit means to feel sheltered, held, and deeply at peace. It’s the quiet sense that you belong somewhere, that the world, or at least a small corner of it, has made space for you just as you are.
Everyone carries their own definition of home. For some, it’s a specific place. For others, it’s a person, a rhythm, a smell, or a memory. Yet what all these meanings share is a sense of belonging: a calm inside the chaos, a soft landing when the world feels too loud.
To explore this idea more deeply, I turned to literature and found five recurring ways writers often describe home – as a place, a feeling, a relationship, a culture, and a process. Below, you’ll find a passage for each theme, along with reflections and prompts to help you explore what home means to you.
1. Home as a Physical Place
“Not a flat. Not an apartment in back. Not a man’s house. Not a daddy’s. A house all my own. With my porch and my pillow, my pretty purple petunias. My books and my stories. My two shoes waiting beside the bed. Nobody to shake a stick at. Nobody’s garbage to pick up after. Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem.”
Sandra Cisneros, A House on Mango Street
Home can be a tangible space, a room filled with familiar smells, a place where we know which light switch does what, where our favorite mug waits for us in the kitchen.
It’s the corner that feels safe, or the shelf that holds the books we love. The space that becomes ours because it reflects who we are.
Journaling Prompt: What are some physical objects or additions that make a space feel like home to you?
2. Home as a Feeling
“I don’t want to own anything until I know I’ve found the place where me and things belong together. I’m not quite sure where that is just yet. But I know what it’s like.” She smiled, and let the cat drop to the floor. “It’s like Tiffany’s,” she said. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in their nice suits, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets. If I could find a real-life place that made me feel like Tiffany’s, then I’d buy some furniture and give the cat a name.”
Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
What Holly is describing might just be the feeling of home, the sense that “nothing bad could happen to you there.” Calm, safety, and most of all belonging. A certain quietness that tells you you’re allowed to just be.
Journaling Prompt: What does the feeling of home feel like to you? Are there places that evoke that same calm, “Tiffany’s” kind of peace?
3. Home as Relationships
“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.”
Sarah Dessen, What Happened to Goodbye
For many of us, home lives in the people we love. It’s the warmth of being known, to be allowed to show up autentically and be full seen. The easy silence between two friends who don’t need to fill it with words. The way a loved one says your name.
Prompt idea: When does a relationship feel like home to you?
4. Home as Identity or Community
“Maybe home is not a place, but simply an irrevocable condition.”
James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
Maybe home is not where we live, but who we are. For Baldwin’s protagonist, that “irrevocable condition” may speak to identity, something we can’t fully leave behind, no matter how far we travel. For some, it’s culture or language. For others, it’s queerness, heritage, or shared experience. And sometimes, we rediscover that sense of home when we meet others who carry a piece of the same story.
Journaling Prompt: What communities, cultures, or groups make you feel most at home?
5. Home as a Process
We know that our journey to our old, new home is cyclical, that we shall never move in once and for all.
Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself
Home is not a final destination, it’s a process. We find it, lose it, redefine it, again and again. Thomas. Wolfe’s famous book title “You can’t go home again” reminds us that once we leave, both we and the place have changed. Home is something we continuously create: by aligning our outer life with our inner truth, by gathering people and places that reflect who we are becoming, by showing up as ourselves. If we build a life from someone else’s blueprint, it might stand, but it will never truly feel like ours, like home.
Journaling Prompt: Where in your life would you like to feel more at home right now?
Final Thought
Home is who we are, who we’re with, and where we choose to be, but more than anything, it’s how we keep coming back to ourselves. If you are interested in a monthly, guided journaling practice on building a life that feels like home, I’d love for you to join the newsletter.
Leave a Reply