Home is more than a sheltering roof and embracing walls. It goes beyond style that’s cozy or cool. Yet, each day, homes are boxed and sold as square footage, curb appeal and resale value.
To create a home for the soul, we have to experience what the soul is. There are many descriptions of soul. Here is mine. Soul is sensed in the force that animates our thoughts, words and actions. It is the wisdom that shapes this animating force into patterns of experience. In the depths of our being, soul is still and boundless. On the surface, it flows in a countless variety of emotions and thoughts. Despite its elusive nature, soul has specific qualities we can understand and sense. Genuineness, depth and connectedness characterize soulful experience.
The culture of home is the collective memory of the family life that is lived and enriched through the prayer, traditions, hospitality, routines, and virtues. Put simply, the culture of home is the soul of family life. Let’s face it, anyone can have or own a house – the physical building of a house does not automatically make a house a home. For a house to truly be a home, it needs a life-giving essence that breathes life into all members that reside in it.
For Jung, the home was everything. It provided both a map of our collective evolution and a description of the individual psyche. The salon, or upper storey, represents the face one presents to the world. The lower level represents the ideas we inherit from our ancestors and the culture. The basement, the vault and the cave, contain more primitive states of being—our unconscious urges, dreams and desires, the raw emotions of which we have little awareness and even less control. While Freud had a hydraulic image of the psyche, with eros or the phallus as the driving force, Jung’s model was architectural. He saw rooms and stairwells, leading to different states of consciousness.
A home that nurtures and delights your soul cannot be described in a checklist of attributes. It is the result of consciously designing rooms and selecting furnishings to enliven the qualities of soul that are personal to you and your family. The forms, textures, colors and qualities of light and space that nourish you indicate your individual characteristics of soul. Your memories of meaningful places, images of homes that visit you in dreams and enriching travel locations point toward the images of soul to incorporate in the design.
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