Nature As Home

Nature Notes - July 2025

What constitutes as “home?” The author attempts to define the sense of “home” and challenge the reader to perhaps expand their definition to include more of the natural world.

- by James Inabinet

“We live in a house; we flourish in a home.”
What makes a house a home? The very idea of home seems to be a matter of meaning. Without it, a house is a mere physical presence, not a home. What gives a house meaning? I think it’s intended first, unconsciously, as in “making a house a home.” Beyond that, it seems to just happen. It’s where one puts her heart: “home is where the heart is.” 

Similarly, home is the locus of love, where loved ones live. It’s where memories are made, evoking stories of how a space is loved-in. Home is neither place nor idea as much as a feeling of “spiritual connection.” Home is that feeling, and a measure of care. We care about home, perhaps, because we feel cared-for there.
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​What happens outside the house-as-home? Home certainly extends to spaces around the house: lawns and bushes, flower beds. It usually ends there, though. 

We don’t feel at home in wild places the same way we do inside the fence. For most of us, the wild world may a good place to visit, but not a place to live. In this important sense we alienate ourselves from wild nature. We may venture there as strangers, but then hurry “home.” It often seems that, once safely returned to our houses, our longing to be in nature quickly returns. It’s like we long to be in nature when not in it and then hurry to get out once we’re in.

I have been investigating ideas of nature, home, and flourishing for more than thirty years. Part of my work has been at the interface between natural systems [i.e., grown] and human systems [i.e., built], but most of it has been in relatively wild nature, seeking aspects of place that make me feel included and whole [in a sense: at home].

I am currently studying human systems more closely, watching how my neighbors live, from city to rural sprawl, to assay the variety of local human living patterns and the varying levels of satisfaction that can be derived from built space. I get a sense that no place is perfect whether bustling city, bucolic woods, or something in-between. But there are places that educe “happy living” more so than others, and there’s a common thread in all of them: the felt sense of being “home.” If this felt sense is there, humans begin to flourish, especially if there’s a modicum of relatively wild nature interspersed or close by.

My back yard is a forest. One might say I have a bedroom, a kitchen, the gurgling spring at the big creek, the bluff camp. These aren’t just places to go on my land, they’re extensions of my home, which has long been more than my house or the forest around it. Home, to me, includes the surrounding ecosystems that make my home viable, animated, real. I don’t live in a vacuum; no one does. These ecosystems are within my “circle of care,” extending west to perhaps New Orleans and east to Mobile, then inland maybe fifty miles. If home is more feeling than fact, then why not extend home feelings to one’s entire “home region?” All of these places, to me, are loci of love, evoking stories about how this entire region is loved-in, and lived-in, together with all the beasts and trees of forest and swamp, marsh and bayou. 
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I’ve wondered, what would happen if more of my neighbors intended and then extended home into the wild places all around us by becoming increasingly connected and “at-one” with it? How might this transform these neighbors and this place as more of us extend a circle of care out into nature-as-home?
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To wit, I am organizing a “pilgrimage home” in Bay St. Louis to find the essence of this “feeling of home,” to learn about it, maybe even evoke it. I am collaborating with thirty [or more] artists in this pilgrimage to discover what home means, how it connects us to place–this place–and how to translate those feelings into art. In this pilgrimage, we will go to several local human communities seeking the “spiritual energies” that make a place home in hopes that, when we find it, our human and natural communities might begin to become home to more of us in a way that can render this collective home place from random collection of dirt and trees, people and streets, houses and shops, into a spiritual home of deep belonging and connection.
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We will conduct the pilgrimage in late August through mid-October to be followed by an art exhibit at the Gail Keenan Gallery, Pass Christian in November/December. This exhibit will of course include 2D and 3D art but also poetry and performed art: reciting anecdotes and storytelling, dance and song. The hope is that all participants receive the gift of expanding their notion of home to include nature all around us and the sense of belonging home evokes. Beyond that, there’s the hope that patrons can share in at least some of this “home-feeling” by simply viewing the art.

If the statement, “we live in a house but flourish in a home” is true, what happens when we extend home to include nature that surrounds us? I want my place to flourish too.

Anyone interested in more information or participating in this pilgrimage, contact me at [email protected].
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