Jane Alexander - Spirit of the Home - How to make your home a sanctuary

Life in our rectory was pretty grim those first weeks and months. Virtually every day something else went wrong and we were spending a small fortune on builders, plumbers, plasterers and electricians. It felt as though the house was trying its level best to make us unwelcome, to force us to leave. That sounded fanciful (and we liked to think of ourselves as rational beings) but as the weeks passed the atmosphere became more and more uncomfortable. Adrian was working away from home during the week and I was left alone in the house with just our cat for company. Although I was quite used to sleeping alone in houses, this one felt horrible. I would go to sleep with the lights on and find myself often waking up in the middle of the night with a terrible sense of dread.

It was heart-rending. We were starting to loathe the house we had loved. Then one day I was so frustrated (something else had gone wrong – I can’t even remember what) that I stood in the hall and screamed at the house: ‘What’s the matter with you? What do you want from us? We’re trying our best; we’re fixing you up. What’s your problem?!’ I wasn’t expecting an answer but somehow I got one. In my head I heard the house reply: ‘What’s the point? You’re just like all the rest. You like the look of me but you don’t really care. When you find out how expensive I am to fix, you’ll just patch me up and then leave me. You won’t bother to fix the damp; to mend the botched jobs. So why don’t you just get out now and be done with it. I’m sick of it all.’

I don’t know whether it was really the house or simply my subconscious but it felt right. I was fascinated to read, years later, that Clare Cooper Marcus has been persuading people to talk to their houses for ages – with incredible results. Anyhow, I decided I had nothing to lose by talking back to the house and I tried to reassure it that we weren’t fly-by-nights; that we might not stay forever but we would undertake to put right the house’s wrongs. We have kept our promise to this proud old house and three years later it is a totally different place. It’s not just that it’s been freshly decorated and has a nice new kitchen, a good solid new roof and strong replacement windows. It has a completely different atmosphere. You walk into the house and it feels comfortable, warm and welcoming. I can never quite decide which favourite spot I will curl up in with a book. Friends love to come to stay and the house seems to laugh at the sound of children and dogs playing up and down its corridors. And nowadays I sleep like a baby.

I hope you can find a similar sense of peace in your home. It takes a shift of attitude but once you start the work it will probably feel curiously familiar. Take it slowly – you can’t change everything at once – and remember that every house has its individual personality. Some, like mine, are old and grumpy like crotchety grandparents and need handling carefully and diplomatically. Others have a younger, brasher attitude and can take more of a fresh sweep of the broom. But whatever your home, do take this opportunity to put the heart back into it. As Dorothy says in The Wizard of Oz, ‘There’s no place like home.’

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WHY WE NEED OUR HOMES

WHY WE NEED OUR HOMES? It probably sounds like a ridiculous chapter heading. Of course we need our homes: everyone wants somewhere warm and comfortable to live. But think about it more deeply. Why do we need a home so badly? How come, when we talk about our worst nightmares, many of us will shudder and say that the most terrible thing we could imagine would be to lose our homes, to become homeless, to live on the streets? Why is it that homeless people are often considered the worst pariahs of society? Few people feel comfortable looking on the homeless – we may call it guilt or pity but most of us scuttle past, or try to ignore homelessness. Why such an extreme reaction? Is it that homelessness, not having a home, a base, is such a deep, in-built fear that many of us project our terror out onto those who are homeless? I think it’s very likely.

Homelessness is a very real and understandable fear. I often have the tiniest taste of it when I spend time in the city. I come up from the country and generally have several appointments in a day and maybe meet friends in the evening. I find I become enormously tired, stressed and even a little depressed – not because my schedule is particularly punishing but because I don’t have a home base. I no longer have a psychic centre in the city and so, at a vital level, I am adrift. I have nowhere to put my bags; no chance to change my shoes if they become uncomfortable; I can’t decide I’m fed up and just want to go home; I’m a wanderer. We often have the same feeling when we go travelling. It’s wonderful at first to be free, to go as the mood takes us, to flit from place to place. But after a time we start to yearn for home, or at least for a base. We need somewhere to hang our hat, somewhere we can shut the door and feel safe and secure. It needn’t be a permanent place but it does need to be a refuge.

THE SECURITY OF HOME

Statistics show that homes are very much on our minds nowadays, with increasing emphasis being put on them. More of us in the West own our homes than ever before. We spend more money on fixing our homes, and one of the most popular hobbies is home improvement. Whereas in the past we might have boasted of going on exotic holidays or buying flashy cars, now we impress our friends with our new sofa, with a fresh coat of paint, with a new alarm system. It seems that now, maybe more than ever before, we need to feel the security of our homes. It’s not hard to see why. Our working lives are becoming ever less secure – few people nowadays can count on a job for life. With divorce rates soaring there is little certainty in our relationships. And as our knowledge of space and the cosmos deepens, we can no longer rely on being at the centre of a gentle, embracing universe. Life is becoming psychologically very frightening. Someone once asked Einstein, ‘What is the most important question you can ask in life?’ He replied, ‘Is the universe a friendly place or not?’ In the past we trusted that the universe was friendly: at the very least we saw ourselves as an important and large part of the universe. But now we are less certain. We see into the cosmos with telescopes and find ourselves becoming smaller and smaller as the telescopes become ever more powerful; our stature and importance seems to dwindle the further into space we look. The physicist Rupert Sheldrake points out that 90–99 per cent of the matter in the known universe is ‘dark matter’, utterly unknown to us:

It’s as if physics had discovered the cosmic unconscious. We don’t know what this dark matter is, or what it does, or how it influences the way things happen.

Space is almost utterly unknown. We may be alone in infinity, which is frightening enough. Even more scary is the thought that we might not be alone and that our fellow inhabitants might not be gentle, evolved ET beings.

It’s a strange feeling for us – this uncertainty. In the last few centuries we have been growing in confidence almost by the minute. Technology has given us greater control over our environment; we have thought ourselves masters of the Earth and everything in it. We merrily plundered the planet’s resources without a regard for the future and then, once we started heading up out of the Earth to the moon and beyond, our arrogance knew no limits. So what if we destroyed the Earth? Undoubtedly there would be another planet ‘out there’ we could colonize. Our planet, our home, become disposable. We turned our backs on Earth and turned our sights towards new places. We headed for the sun. The very name of the space missions, Apollo, drum home the fact. Apollo, or Helios, is the god of the sun – bright, shining, new, outgoing and outreaching, a very masculine energy which always thrusts upwards, away from Earth, the warm, embracing, feminine energy of the goddess.