home.

My family travelled away for Christmas to be with extended family. It was only a few hours away from Auckland, on the east coast of the North Island and near the ocean. Always a favourite place to be. 

As I walked along the very long shoreline taking in the fresh sea air and feeling the cool water licking at my feet, my #2024_creativegrowth theme suddenly came to me. 

It’s a simple one – Home. Home to me is my local surroundings, being at home, feeling home, considering my region, city or country, home. I guess it really is a feeling of belonging and a sense of where I am and feeling I am Home. I haven’t always felt like this. Home for a period as a child wasn’t always a refuge for me, but making my own home and lifestyle has made me appreciate Home so much more. I’ve realised too that it’s ok that I do not have to have a desire to explore the world physically.

So many people across the world have lost homes in 2023 to war, wild weather and economic hardship, so my appreciation of Home is amplified.

I found these quotes about Home which clicked with me. What resonates for you? 

“I climb, I backtrack, I float. I ramble my way home”
Mary Oliver (1998). “West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems”, p.63, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

“Home is the nicest word there is.” — Laura Ingalls Wilder. “Little house on the prairie”.

“The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” — Maya Angelou.

 “How does it feel to be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?” — Bob Dylan.

“The traveler can get the greatest joy of travel even without going to the mountains, by staying at home and watching and going about the field to watch a sailing cloud, or a dog, or a hedge, or a lonely tree.” — Lin Yutang.

“We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.” – Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness.

If you feel this theme has meaning for you, I would love you to join in and post your images that convey Home to you using the Instagram hashtag, #2024_creativegrowth.

Do please tag me @adiandbert otherwise I may not be able to see your recent posting given the changes in the way posts in hashtags now appear on the app. This way, I can also share your images in Stories as I am alerted to them.

Here’s wishing for a more peaceful 2024 and for the basic right of a Home to be restored to so many displaced people. 

I am giving away an acrylic art work (20cm diameter) below, created in late 2022 called ‘Rangitoto dreaming’. If you follow me on Instagram you’ll know that I often post videos or photos in Stories of Rangitoto island, located off Auckland’s east coast, as it conveys a special sense of place for me.

DM me on Insta if you’d like it and in exchange I’d appreciate if you donate to Save the Children – whatever you can afford, and I will mail the 20cm in diameter, original acrylic art work (on a canvas panel) to you.

Here’s wishing you a creative 2024 and to not take your freedom and safe places for granted. Create, create, create. As much as you can. 

Claudia x
Home, January 2024