Home is Where the Heart is

Sorry for the silence of late everyone - life seems to have got in the way!  Above all, we recently came back from a lovely 10 days in soggy Cornwall, which was a much needed tonic for us all. Ok, it would have been nice if the sun had come out a bit more, but really the rain was just an excuse to don wellies and raincoat and splash around in puddles and go head to head with the wind on the cliff tops :)


And then we came back, and well, you know what it's like when you come back from hols… big downer, back to reality and all that. Except this time it was like coming back to a life which we hadn't quite realised was SO difficult. We knew things were tough, in many ways, but a break away peeled the scales away from our eyes and made us see things a little clearer. And with that, it has made us think a bit more about where we want to be in life.

Ooh big questions huh? Yep.

Amusingly, the lovely Lucy at Dreaming Aloud just posted a link which kind of sums it up (or some of it at least): Less Work, More Living, summed up in a nutshell as "Earn less, spend less, emit and degrade less". It's what we strived for right from the start of our adventure, when we set off in Rona (our camper) back in 2008. But life changes and gradually you sink back into the old ways, accumulate things again, strive for more and ultimately end up needing more money for it all.

With our boat we hoped to create a home for our family. But in order to achieve that we will be tied down to hard slog for the next ten years at least - and the irony is by doing that we also make a choice between making a home and making a family, because any time we do have (i.e. weekends) must be spent either working on the boat or enjoying time with each other. You could say we could try half-and-half, but believe me, it doesn't work out that way!

So, another turning point. In a radical shift away from traditional views of "hearth and home", we are now looking at creating a home within ourselves and carrying it wherever the wind blows us. Sure, it's nice to have pretty things and familiar things all around: bookshelves groaning, our trusty range bubbling away all manner of goodies; our own bed (which actually isn't so comfortable!) and so on. But at the end of the day things don't matter, do they? They just reflect what's inside us (or should). What if we were to look to the light within instead; the source of our personalities and dreams and feelings?

I hope we can learn to shine enough as individuals and as a family to be able to create "home" wherever we might require it, and at any time it is needed. They say "home is where the heart is" - and we're taking that in its most literal reading!