There’s no place like home, Dorothy repeats like a mantra. She clicks the heels of her magic shoes until she opens her eyes to find herself in the land of her dreams once more. Who knew it would turn out to be Kansas? Dorothy’s wild adolescent heart had sent her roving through new worlds and on astonishing adventures. She’d met a gracious spirit, a talking tree, a bogus wizard, and a deadly foe. She even made three unforgettable friends. But in the end Dorothy discovers that home is where her heart most longs to be. Familiar faces are the ones she’d been seeking all along.

Home has this kind of magnetic authority over us. While some of us are glad to travel far and wide, homecoming is always welcome: back to our own beds, clean clothes, and established routines. We return to the place where our net of relationships will catch us. We come home to where our possessions are, those knickknacks and keepsakes that remind us what life has been about so far. When we come home, in a way, we return to ourselves.

Because home is so vital to our sense of security and self-understanding, the church recommends a ritual of home blessing every year on the feast of Epiphany. In the little town where I grew up, our pastor would come to each parishioner’s house and mark in chalk the front door lintel with the date of the new year, connected with and encased by crosses. Gradually the markings would wear away, but in the meantime we were reminded that all our comings and goings were blessed. Something was expected of us when we exited into the world beyond that door. And something else was expected when we resumed our lives together under that roof.

Home is a sacred place, not just a space to store our stuff. Home reveals something about us. It doesn’t matter whether we’re homeowners, apartment dwellers, or RV park denizens. Carl Jung viewed the living space as a model of the mind. Is yours organized or cluttered, spare or burdened, clean or carelessly kept? Does the space you inhabit function, or is it a mess of abandoned tasks and lost items?

What we keep around us are containers of meaning, according to Edwin Heathcote, an architectural commentator who has made a livelihood decoding the messages inherent in our environments. It’s not just the diaries, photographs, and bookshelves that record our journeys. Everything in our personal space announces where we’ve been and what we’ve deemed worth preserving.