When it’s minus 29 outside, a house with a north-facing wall of windows isn’t the greatest idea. We’ve a gorgeous view of trees and water… but we’re living with the freezer door open.

There was method to our madness when we built our home. We wanted to see the great outdoors – and we wanted to bring the great outdoors inside. So we made the layer between us and nature as thin as we could, perhaps to pretend we were living in it, that we were part of it.

Perhaps because, deep down, we knew that’s where our real home was.

We construct our homes – we construct our lives – to bring us happiness, to make us feel safe, to allow us to put our stamp on a piece of the planet we can control. So we build houses and businesses and organizations and societies to make sense of an unruly world… and we call that structure we’ve built home.

But what if all this construction is actually moving us further away from home? What if we’re lost in a maze of walls?

What if the home we’ve constructed is as real as a show on our TV screens?

What if we’ve forgotten what real home is?

Starting tomorrow and for the next 21 days, I’ll be writing about Being Home. I’ll explore what home means, how we’ve strayed far from it, and how (perhaps) we can find our way back.

I hope you’ll follow along. The next email will be tomorrow.