To Our World Family: Home Is Where Your Cracked Mug Is

Having been on the road quite a bit since leaving the states, I find that I miss “home”.

Home is that feeling of coming to a place and knowing it’s your bed, your stuff, your favorite chair or favorite book or kitchen knife or musty old book or cracked mug (that you painstakingly glued back together because it meant so much to you, and you’re so proud of because it still holds coffee or hot chocolate).

Home is also much more than that.

And as we are on the move as much as we have been, a lot of times I find myself looking to have the experience of “home”. And it’s so nice when it happens.

Returning to Keith and Carol’s in Auckland felt like coming home. This is a place we called home when we house-sat there for 10 days in August. The days we stayed again with Keith and Carol in September and October, it felt like coming home to family.

The feeling is good.

Within the last year, we’ve built families in various places around the world.

Kattya and Ricardo – our fun party cousins in Costa Rica
Dan and Rilda – our retired but not yet done aunt and uncle near Panama City
Dave and Cora – our experienced and still adventurous aunt and uncle in the mountains of Panama
Martin – our German brother in Nicaragua
Victor (and family) – our open-hearted uncle in Granada, Nicaragua
Maribel – our wiser sister in Ecuador (and her family – all of her family)
Pablo – our cool brother in Ecuador
Amy – our International sister
Alex and Kyra – ZEE GERMANS!
Chris and Jenny – long lost Australian cousins we’ve reconnected with in Cuenca, Ecuador
Vicky – a fun cousin with much to share in northern Peru

And we’ve done the same here in New Zealand now with Matt, Nicole, and Caden; Keith and Carol; and with Mark and Nessy and their children in Northland (at The J Taitokerau).   Because of the people I got to work with, even working at BEST and the Heart Foundation were starting to have feelings of “home” (even though I only worked at each for a few days).

This global family is enriching us and our lives in ways we don’t yet fully comprehend.

I just hope that we’re pouring the same love and caring back into all of you as you have poured into us.

The human heart is one. We are one big family.

And to the family reading this (both the family I’ve met and the family I haven’t), regardless of what the television news and the newspapers tell you, please know that our human family is strong, beautiful, generous, and absolutely amazing.

On the whole, we are a most unusual and amazing type of thing as humans in the capacity we have to care for one another.

To those of you who have become our family along the way, thank-you for opening your hearts to us as we have come tumbling into your lives.

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Related posts:

1. Being Home: Housesitting in Auckland New Zealand
2. 7 Travel Questions: 4) How to Handle Family Relationships
3. My favorite day so far…being welcomed as part of an Ecuadorian family
4. Boquete, Panama: The Vacation Rental Casita That Is Our For Now Home
5. Interview with Caroline: Traveling the World

TAGS: cracked mug, family, home, news, television, world