Nowhere is summer more beautiful to me than at the Heissiwald. The wild garden rustles in the wind. In the shade of the lilac it stays cool while the biting sun slowly draws the colour out of the lawn. Between cornflowers and poppies, gnarled roses run wild and spread their scent in the warm air. In the rooms of this place I became who I am. The listed timber-framed house at the edge of the forest was once a house for forest workers, plain, boarded in white, with green shutters and two old, creaking wooden doors. I look at it today with great gratitude. I see how much it now gives my children too.
And yet this place is quietly losing its claim on what lies ahead of us. Everything that led me back here is still there. The closeness to family, the familiar rhythm, the matter-of-factness of everyday life. What long felt like a hold is beginning to loosen. How can I not be at home in a place where I am so at home? The question surprises me. Home belongs to life so naturally that we hardly notice it. Only when it begins to waver do we start to think about it.
For a long time home seemed to me bound to places, to houses and familiar paths. But it is not exhausted by that. It reaches beyond the place. It is a web of memories, expectations and inner images that is hard to name and stays effective precisely because of that.
Perhaps that is because a home does not only begin where we consciously perceive it. The paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott describes it as a kind of envelope of the self, a space that holds without demanding anything. In it the self may be undirected, less controlled, less watchful. Familiar furniture, smells and light do not have to be assessed. The unconscious recognises them. This recognition takes the decision off our hands. The inner alertness sinks.
This relief works all the way into the body. In his polyvagal theory Stephen Porges describes how a space experienced as safe lets the nervous system switch over. Breathing deepens, muscle tone eases, watchfulness may sink. The philosopher Simone Weil calls rootedness one of the central and at the same time most overlooked needs of the human soul. Perhaps that is exactly why I sense so precisely when it begins to waver.
When I look around our flat, as an interior architect I recognise the symptoms clearly. They hang from the ceiling, or rather, they do not hang there. We have lived here for several years. And yet many of the lights have never been put up. Instead, simple plastic fittings, bulbs that serve their purpose, nothing more. It almost embarrasses me, because it contradicts everything I know about rooms and about telling a life through design. The lights stand ready, some for years. But they never seem to have become urgent, as if there were no right moment to put them up. The walls, too, stay strikingly empty. Shelves lie ready, unopened. At some point I had the feeling the right moment had passed.
Architectural psychology has words for this restraint. The environmental psychologists Irwin Altman and Setha Low describe strong place attachment as an interplay of lived experience, personal meaning and active appropriation. A place becomes a home where people begin to leave traces, where they change things, adapt them and stay. Weaker attachment shows in provisional solutions, in rooms that function without being told. That is exactly what I recognise. It is not rootedness we lack. We have history, family and everyday life here in almost every direction. And yet certain actions fail to happen, out of a hesitation I can hardly explain to myself.
The environmental psychologist Harold Proshansky describes how places become part of the self when we express ourselves through them and let them into our everyday lives. If this appropriation stays incomplete, rooms emerge that are inhabited but not fully made one’s own. What shows itself in the lights never put up is not carelessness. It is a tension between staying and moving on, between settling and keeping open. I live in an in-between that runs along quietly without announcing itself. Perhaps a home only becomes visible when it begins to waver. And exactly here begins what I want to understand before we go: which rooms I am made of, and which I want to carry on.