Finding Home: Podcast & Essay Series

Finding Home: Podcast & Essay Series

Season 2 of my Patreon Podcast is a series of interviews with extraordinary ordinary people about Finding Home. (After initially publishing these at Patreon I'm moving all the interviews to my blog. The titles below with an * are posts that include an audio of the interview. Eventually, they will all have the audio included.)

The subject of home is deeply personal for me, it touches the core of who I am and what I value most in life. It’s also intellectually fascinating to me since it’s one of our most universal human needs and something we seek to secure individually and collectively. So much of what we do is driven by our most basic need to build a home for ourselves and our families.

Home. What is it? How do we define it? How do we find it in our increasingly migratory lives?

Is home a sense of geography and culture? Is it the structure you live in? Is it the relationships that sustain you? Is it all that and more?

How we answer these questions, how we define home, is an expression of the relationships, environments, activities and energies that sustain and support us. Home speaks to our past, present and future.

Finding Home started as a series of interviews with people about this most fundamental aspect of being human.

We explore the homes of our childhood, our dreams of home through adulthood, and the actual places we live, geographically and physically. We talk about where we've come from and what we're hoping to carry into the future, as we create and inhabit our own ideas and embodiment of "home".

Three years after publishing the podcast series I returned to this subject in a capstone essay, It all started with a move: Finding Home. That essay is available in its entirety here, and as an audio download here. You can also find that essay, divided into 4 blog instalments in the series of posts below.


Finding Home ~ The conclusion

Finding Home ~ The conclusion

Then it all became rather obvious. We’re the adventurers and explorers, the migrators without property. We’ve built flexibility into our lives and our work. We would move to my parents. We’d sail the boat of our family life into the security of their port.

My own migration story

My own migration story

Living in Montreal with no family, no mountains and no purchase of a property to anchor us, the question of “where is home” became insistent, especially after I lost the religious beliefs of my childhood.

Is localism the answer?

Is localism the answer?

The answer to the interpersonal and intrapersonal tensions and problems of migrations are more nuanced and bigger than a simple "stay local" edict.

It all started with a move

It all started with a move

Analyzing my own migrations, to interrogate the source of the “where is home?” question I have been asking myself for nearly 25 years.

In response to the times

In response to the times

It’s time to talk about the conclusions I’ve been drawing from my life experience and “the state of the world”, as filtered through the lens of this advice: "Prepare for what you’ve already been through, plus a bit more."

The News from Nova Scotia

The News from Nova Scotia

Why do people live where they live? How do they decide where to call "home"? How do you define home? How does the answer to these questions change through the different seasons of our lives? What's gained and what's lost in where we choose to live?

*Finding home as a third culture kid

*Finding home as a third culture kid

As with everyone, Paola's ideas of home - what feels like home and what defines home - is heavily influenced by her growing years. Which for her happened in three languages and three cultures.