How To Be at Home in a Changing World

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.

                                                            —Wendell Berry, The Unforeseen Wilderness

Having come to Taos, New Mexico, riding the light of long, nearly solstice days. The high desert has been spared fire so far this year. It offers a welcome respite from the already-thick humidity of Georgia in June. The trip’s impetus is to work with a writing collaborator—gloriously, for the first time, in person—but mostly I am here to shift the frame. I need a week to set down the burdens of home.

Two weeks before my arrival here, my father died, just shy of his seventy-fifth birthday. Alzheimer’s had taken him apart, block by block, over a decade. The disease sets up shop in the seahorse of the hippocampus; one of the first symptoms is losing your way. My dad lost his ability to follow well-grooved routes—Boo, I’m . . . I’m not sure which way to turn—and ultimately any amount of ambulation. He lost his stories, then later almost all of his words. Those losses were especially gutting for a man who built a vocation around them as a sports journalist.

Being with him at the threshold of life’s end, and walking with him as long as I could, has shifted something in me. The fathomlessness of this whole experience—to be a person, in a body, for some uncertain number of years on this Earth, then suddenly gone—it feels altogether infinite. I find myself wading through a raft of new wonderings about liminality and the journey on from here.

In the aftermath of loss, existential questions often sweep in. Questions about what makes a good life and matters most. Questions about impermanence and the twin truths of intrinsic possibility and inevitable ends. The probing, clarifying nature of loss can, I think, be one of its gifts. And the questions seem to have a way of tagging along, even as I cross the Mississippi River and the Great Plains to reach the Southern Rockies.

Of all the wonderings that I’ve brought with me to Taos, the ones that feel most weighty and most insistent are about home: Will the meaning of home shift as family roots that have held me loosen? Is this a moment to step back and think anew about where and how to live? Amid so much disruption in the world, how do we all find or feel at home?

Home, the dictionary warrants, is about where we reside. The word’s typical use suggests something fairly fixed, even permanent—a place we remain, or, if we leave, to which we return. Homecoming is ritual. Animals home, returning by instinct to their territory. To be at home is to be at ease, at peace.

But when flux comes to neighborhoods, ecosystems, and entire countries — how can we not lose our bearings? The scale of loss is different, but the sensation we know well. In the thick of the climate crisis and its abutting troubles, the places we call home today may become unrecognizable or be lost completely. Some—like Bayou Liberty, Louisiana, where climate justice leader Colette Pichon Battle lives—almost certainly will. Intellectually, I comprehend the acute wildfire risks in California, yet I was still stunned when cousins in Los Angeles lost their home to one. My father’s question, “which way to turn,” takes on another, awful, meaning.

Wayfinding, in very literal ways, will be part of climate futures ahead, and it will not always be a choice. At times, it will be the catapulting outcome of turmoil and displacement, which are all the more difficult in a world of borders and barriers, of battle lines around who belongs and who does not. How many hundreds of millions of people may need to migrate has everything to do with how hot it gets and how high the oceans climb—whether temperatures are survivable and land is still land.

Home is in the crosshairs. The need to re-home is sure to be common. The questions of where home is, what it means, how to make it—they feel weighty and urgent for many. I’m beginning to accept that these burdens cannot really be set down. Maybe the shifting sands, both underfoot and within, are calling us to embrace the interplay of rooting and roaming that is so core to humankind. To be an Earthling is to be a denizen of change.

In the loam of my psyche, a new question is sprouting: “How do I make of myself a home that is expansive enough to hold all of it—the rootedness and roaming, the devastation and defiance, the knowingness and mystery?”

by Kathrin K. Wilkinson, Orion |  Read more:

Image: via Amber Lotus/Andrews McMeel, 2026