Shelter for the Spirit:
How to Make Your Home a Haven in a Hectic World

Anyone claiming four walls and a roof can create a physical environment that is spiritually sustaining.

A house can reveal the extent of your assets, but a home reveals the expanse of your heart. Surely some dwellings are grander than others and some neighborhoods more desirable, but a home is judged by different standards than a house is. A house or apartment gets points for being spacious and well groomed, a home for being relaxed and well loved.

Most of us have some mental image of the "perfect" home and its inhabitants. When this ideal is truly our own, a faithful replica of our inner blueprint, it gives us something to strive for in creating and maintaining homes that both serve and express us best. In many cases, however, too much of our model comes from outside ourselves, from society and media, and we end up with a prepackaged image, a sort of clip-art archetype that most real-life homes have no chance of matching. My adopted image of home and family was the generic model, including two parents, two kids, a white picket fence and a Border collie in the weed-free front yard. It's picturesque, but I don't live there. To favor the fantasy over my actual home was to sell short both my home and the life I live in it. The happiness of home is not reserved for only one kind of person, one type of family, or one time of life.

Human beings need a place to foster an inner life. We can create such a place from a house or apartment that used to be only a Tudor or a two-flat by cleaning out a closet, eating in a little more often, snatching a few minutes alone in the morning to sit with our private plans and thoughts and feelings. Such small but specific actions increase the beauty, satisfaction and peace of mind we experience.

If you're like me, you feel more in control of your life when your house in order. You probably feel happier when objects of sentimental or aesthetic appeal populate your environment. When you have a place where friends easily congregate, you feel supported. When you know that there is some square footage in the universe set aside for you to be comfortable, creative and leave a legacy with your name on it, you feel secure.

I've learned what it takes for me to be happy at home from the places I've lived -- the London bed-sitter I rented at eighteen; modern complex apartments with balconies and trash compactors; and fine houses in their dotage with old wood and leaded glass and gas lines behind the ceiling fixtures. I've learned by being home a lot as a homeschooling mother and a writer working at home, as well as by traveling for long stretches and needing to bring a sense of home along on the journeys. I've also learned by observing the homes of others.

As a child, I did a lot of visiting. There were the suburban ranches of my mother's half-dozen siblings, the cool stone and mahogany bungalows of my elderly nanny's seemingly ancient friends, and the tiny tenement flats where I accompanied my father, a doctor, on house calls. The patients who lived there didn't have the money for a hospital stay, but some of them avoided hospitals on principle. "Those are just places to die," I remember hearing from a tiny old woman who had once met Lindbergh and could name the books of the Bible in order. "If the Lord wants to take me, He can come and get me right here where I live."

Unconsciously, I began to read those houses and apartments as a palmist would read the lines on a hand. Each dwelling revealed the character of its inhabitants well beyond their financial status or their taste in furniture. Each one had a personality. Sometimes the simplest were the best; they tended to have the most dogs and the most cookies.

Since then, I've learned that anyone claiming four walls and a roof can create a physical environment that is spiritually sustaining. I've visited Tibetan refugee camps in Nepal and India where every home, however meager, has an elaborate altar. In that culture, home is sacred. The altar is the focal point of the household, and each one I visited had that peaceful yet purposeful feeling we think of as reserved for cathedrals, or at least good libraries.

I resonate to this kind of atmosphere in other people's houses and aim to create it in my own. This doesn't require artistic talent or design training. It can be as easy as bringing in people and plants, ideas and attitudes, books and music that you love. Moreover, the simple act of caring for our dwelling places and those who live there is, when we do it with our full attention, a spiritual practice on par with any religious discipline.

It may indeed be spiritual practice customized for our era, because in this turn-of-the-millennium time, the need to connect our spirituality and our home is particularly apparent. Perhaps because so many of us have experienced the transiency of everything else -- sex is not what it was in the seventies, money is not what it was in the eighties -- we're looking to eternity. We crave something solid, something safe, something to keep. We want to go home.

So we turn the key in the lock, open the door, and . . . the dog has made so much confetti out of Kleenex that the bedroom floor resembles Times Square on New Year's morning . . . the bathtub faucet is leaking again and the plumber who fixed it six weeks ago says the warranty was only good for thirty days . . . fresh vegetables age in the crisper, but there's a meeting tonight, and one of the kids has soccer practice. Dinner will probably come from the microwave or Taco Bell.

Or -- in the midst of your busy day, you could find a few minutes to pick up fresh salad from the produce market, a loaf of honest bread from a neighborhood bakery, a bunch of daisies from a street vendor, and dine in simply at a beautifully set table. Such a tiny experience has immense significance when it reminds us that home -- even with dishes in the sink and bills on the table -- is the place where giving to yourself and those you love has at least a shot at being top priority.

The building you live in is inanimate in one sense, but every atom within it is pulsating with life. It has its own story in which you and the people you live with are characters, just as the structure is a silent character in your biography. You provide the opportunity for life to continue in this place. It in turn gives you a place to cultivate your soul -- and do the laundry.

Adapted with permission from the introduction of Shelter for the Spirit: How to Make Your Home a Haven in a Hectic World by Victoria Moran, Copyright © 1997 by Victoria Moran.

Victoria Moran is a member of the National Speakers Association who has an extensive list of interviews and appearances in national magazines, radio and TV. She has held workshops worldwide and has presented at meetings of the American Natural Hygiene Society in the United States. Victoria's newest book is Shelter for the Spirit: How to Make Your Home a Haven in a Hectic World. She is also the author of Get the Fat Out: 501 Simple Ways to Cut the Fat in any Diet and The Love-Powered Diet: A Revolutionary Approach to Healthy Eating (1992), both of which were selections of the Prevention Book Club and the Doubleday Health Book Club.

Next Article