Tips for an Ecological Home
Your home, and your knowing of Home, is not a discrete place – it is part of an ecosystem.
When your home feels lacking, in need of expansion or renewal, there are often more options than commonly understood. Before considering renovating or building, there are useful questions you can ask yourself:
Do I really need more space or things?
How can I live more intentionally?
What is it I am really looking for?
Perhaps the work at hand is within your self.
Dwelling explores the relationship between Home and home. The process of creating your home and living in your home can help you distinguish between these impulses. In my work with clients, I consider these ideas in this way.
- Home – your inner, spiritual origin; your deep, still center, united with all; where Spirit resides.
- home – your heart, physical home, and the earth.
Exploring what Home means to you as an internal image can help you understand what is essential and life-giving, separated from the acquisitive trappings our society constantly throws at us.
Your physical home can provide a still center of refuge where you find the silence in which clear thoughts are born.
Space can be a place for intimacy to unfold – nothing gives us a more profound sense of Home or Love than being met and heard in an intimate way. Slowly, through your connection to and engagement with the relationships of your family and community and place – all of which comprise your ecosystem – you move towards wholeness; you know your Home.
On the other hand, space can create a vacuum – another commodity, another way to proclaim self-worth as measured in quantity or ostentatiousness. Many homes have large rooms where families communicate with each other via email or texting, with no place to cuddle with a loved one or curl up and enjoy a quiet moment of reflection.
Exploring what Home means to you as an internal image can help you understand what is essential and life-giving, separated from the acquisitive trappings our society constantly throws at us.
And the spaces of our homes are typically internally oriented and cut off from the land – focused on a TV or computer screen – or they command a view rather than breathing in and out with the land, and being inextricably woven into a whole.
If you can understand your self to be as a part of a larger whole, you may feel less of a need to attempt to create an exclusive, discrete entity. Who needs a large home when you can engage in intimate relationships?
So how can you engage with your home to nurture your knowing of Home, to create spaces of intimacy and connection?
- Often the work that needs to happen is internal, not external; in ourselves, not our shelters. If you take the time and use your imagination, you can engage in a dialogue between your Home and your home.
- Simply painting a wall a color with a calming intention creates a more restful bedroom.
- Paying attention to the arc of the sun and how it activates different rooms throughout the day expands your awareness and unites you with your physical source.
- Rearranging furniture in your living room allows energy to flow more freely, opening up your life-force.
- Creating a pond with a small waterfall can bring back soothing memories of childhood, or that same pond and waterfall in an urban backyard can calm the frantic city energy.
This work doesn’t require more space – it asks you to open your heart to the space within yourself and your home. There are endless ways to create place, and you can imbue your material world with spirit through your intention and engagement. What you then create can nurture you, and those in your life, more fully.
