House, Home, Country I live in

I just read a very unexpected blog post in my reader. One of those, that make you pause and wonder how someone else, that you don’t really know, might have the similar thoughts…

I was surprised when I found a post that connected me on a personal level to Miguel from Around the Corner Blog, which I read regularly due to professional interest. He writes about his feeling of having left his native Panama to come to live in the United States and that home is now

where his heart is…with my family, the quixotic (Walter Mitty analogy wouldn’t be far off here, either) struggle at work, in the streets and highways where I still get lost. Would I give it up to go back? Maybe, if I had the courage. Karyn’s post reminds me that “home,” especially when it is a memory, is always near…and that I can visit home anytime I want.

He quotes from another blog post from Karyn an expat form South Africa living in England who in turn quotes from Ron Lubensky (Canadian living in Australia). (Updated: Thank you Karyn for pointing it out)

“How long are you here for?”
“Forever”
“How often do you go home?”
“Every day”

Karyn also quotes an Afrikaan’s expression:

“ek sit in my eie agterplaas en verlang huis toe” – I sit in my own back garden and miss home. I need to remember that being at home is no guarantee of feeling at home.

All the above quotes caught my attention.

I am in a situation where I was born in Germany, lived there until I was 14 years old and then moved to Argentina for “only” six years. Those seemed to be my most formative years, since Argentina is where I call “home” in my heart. I have been living in the USA for almost twenty years now (!!!) and still don’t feel “home”. I go and visit Germany and feel like a complete stranger in the country, where I hold citizenship, speak the language without an accent, and feel oddly familiar in places without knowing what will come around the next corner. It almost seems like a dream to be in places that you “know”, but are still completely lost without being able to find your way around. Only when I return to Argentina, I feel it when I say ” I am going home”…
When you take things such as native language fluency, citizenship, memories that tie you to one place, a mortgage, your work, your family and friends into consideration, the questions arises:

Can you feel home without belonging and belonging without being home?

I had a powerful experience this summer at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. There is a Garden of Exile, that not only is beautiful, but also conveys the feeling that many exiles feel. In my Travel blog I posted the following that day. Walking in the garden of exile, one could feel a certain wave of nausea and even dizziness while trying to navigate through the labyrinth of columns, where you did not know what you were going to find around the next corner.

In the garden of Exile:

where 49 tilted columns are standing on a sloping plot of ground. They are filled with earth and with Russian oliver trees whose branches form a canopy of leaves in summer. The exile meant rescue and safety, but the escape from Germany and the arrival in a foreign country caused disorientation. The refugees often had difficulty gaining foothold in their new home.