I wouldn't normally be drawn to books about finding yourself but Jennifer Kavanagh's The O of Home is touching and inspiring in a way that brings to mind Thoreau's Walden.
The O of Home is a remarkably honest, unpretentious, clear-eyed account of a courageous woman getting rid of her worldly goods, and a lot of emotional baggage, and finding a new and exhilarating freedom.

This thought-provoking book is an exploration of the meaning of
> “home”. Instinctively we may feel that we know what the word means –
> surely it’s just where we live. But Kavanagh forces us to realise that
> “home” can mean many things, not just a physical building, but also a
> country or an idea of nationhood, or many other things depending on
> circumstance. She explores all of those meanings and interpretations
> here, and perhaps most importantly what it means to be homeless, what
> it feels like to have nowhere to go for either physical or emotional
> shelter and safety.
> Covering a wide-range of human predicaments, from dysfunctional
> families to migration, from exile to forced displacement, the book
> helps us to consider not only what home actually is, but the
> importance of ensuring that everyone has one.
On the whole I enjoyed this book. Told primarily through anecdotes,
> often first-hand, about the people she has met while researching her
> subject, the facts and figures, although often disturbing, are easy to
> absorb, and the style is very accessible for such a serious work. I
> was less impressed with the final chapter which deals with the
> spiritual aspects of home. Kavanagh is a Quaker and thus draws on her
> own spiritual and religious beliefs to plead her message. However,
> that message remains fundamental to all humanity – that we must help
> each other to feel more at home in our fractured world.
> This is an important book and should be required reading for anyone
> working with the homeless and dispossessed. A good choice for book
> groups too – although I can imagine meetings going on for rather
> longer than usual, as not only are there so many themes to discuss,
> but many readers will have their own personal experiences to contribute.
> As for the title, the author tells us that the qualities of home are
> reflected in the circle (O), an ancient symbol for safety, equality,
> inclusiveness and eternity. Reading this book is a welcome opportunity
> to reflect on that.
> Personal ****
> Group *****

An unusual and original exploration of the meaning of home, the title referring to the circle as a symbol of safety, inclusiveness and eternity. In our uprooted era, the idea of home is especially poignant, and we have to start by being at home to ourselves with a sense of belonging. Many themes are explored and corresponding experiences evoked in the course of the journey. The relationship between house and home, the experience of homelessness, of being on the move, the importance of safety and community, of boundaries as well as belonging; the sacredness of home and the sense of coming home. The author sums things up by saying that home is where we all want to be. The book is as much a voyage of discovery for the reader as it was for the author, but she does not see it as a static concept, but rather as a balance between security and freedom, between belonging and longing. This seems to me to be correct, and it is well worth taking the journey through this book towards a better understanding of the concept.

There are some people – very few, I think – who are both the centre of gravity wherever they happen to be, and who radiate a sense of calm and positivity: Jennifer Kavanagh is such a person. Whether this aura is a product of the many important community projects with which she has been involved or vice versa, I don’t know. That she is writing about the importance of home is entirely appropriate, however. It is a topic of great importance, whose complexity and subtlety neccessitate similar attributes in the questing author – these, she has. Also, Kavanagh, an attentive listener, has experienced very different sorts of home, has worked among homeless people, and has helped eastenders, both new and established, to a better standard of living: she has a range of reference others may lack. Her book – The O of Home – and the talks and musical gigs relating to it, are created by someone who not only knows her stuff, but has processed the information with sympathy for its sources and without the slightest condescension. I urge you to catch Kavanagh if you can.

This is a book that opens the heart. It moves between cultures and individuals, listening, noting, comparing. It asks profound questions, some of which have surprising answers, some of which have no answers. It invites the reader to walk for a few steps in many other people's shoes, to understand their journeys, to glimpse briefly their experience of home or homelessness, belonging or exile, to touch their joys or miseries. It takes us at one extreme into the wretchedness of refugees and asylum seekers, of forced displacement, of not being welcome anywhere; and at the other into lifestyles most of us can only gasp at (I am still marvelling at the man whose fixed television was so far away on the other side of the room that he needed binoculars to see the screen . . .) And in between it looks at how we who have a choice may choose to live – owning a home, renting, becoming settled, needing to feel free, living on land, on water, on wheels, travelling, belonging, not belonging – all answers to the question the author began with: “What is home to you?”
Jennifer Kavanagh's central metaphor is the circle ”O”, an ancient symbol, associated with safety, protection, community, eternity. (“Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours” - Black Elk). For some this sense of home is a present reality, for some a yearning for something unrealised or lost; sometimes it is a dream of something that never has been. At each stage of the book she includes “broken circles”, those who are without a home or a country or a community to belong to. In this she is insightful and compassionate, understanding instinctively what it is like not to feel at home, not to belong. She touches on nationality, migration, exile, displacement, refugees, asylum seekers, travellers, nomads. She asks what it is like to be homeless in a rich country, to be destitute through no choice of your own, to be made destitute by immigration laws, to lose everything, to feel abandoned. And she looks at the experience of attaining security and safety in exile (“Even if we are happy and healthy, something is missing. Our real home”. “Wherever I am, for the rest of my life, I will never be entirely at home again”.) It is impossible to read all this and remain untouched.
And for those of us who have a home, or are planning to acquire a home and can make choices, it offers questions that invite us to pause and think deeply: What does the word “home” mean to you? Does where you live feel like home? Why? Why not? Does a home need more than one person? When is a home not a home? When do you feel at home in yourself?
Reading this book is a circular journey and a spiritual one. It begins with home as the place we live, and widens the circle into home as relationship, as family, as neighbourhood, as community. It considers the earth, the planet, the universe, being at one with the divine. It offers us a journey of self-discovery, of coming home to ourselves, to God. And it invites us to take reponsibility - for ourselves and how we live, for others, for the planet.
For me, one of the gifts of this book was to introduce me to the thinking of Christopher Alexander and his radical view of the role of the architect. He speaks of “the values we want to live by, rather than merely of how we want things to look . . . We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect, and then to remind us of them . . . What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty”. (Christopher Alexander: A Pattern Language. OUP 1977).
In his book The Timeless Way of Building (OUP 1979) he explains:
“This quality can only come to life in us when it exists within the world that we are part of. We can come alive only to the extent the buildings and towns we live in are alive. The quality without a name is circular; it exists in us when it exists in our buildings; and it only exists in our buildings when we have it in ourselves.”
This is a book that invites us to be truthful and to express that truth uncompromisingly in the ways we live. It is a book to savour and to draw courage from - the courage to be true to ourselves and to what we know of the divine, to be true to each other, to those around us, to all fellow creatures on the planet, and to the planet itself. It reminds us of our deepest need to belong and to heal what has been wounded, to overcome our fear of difference, of the “other”, and to be truly at home in every aspect of our lives.

When I went to Jennifer Kavanagh’s launch of this book at the Quaker Centre I wasn’t sure what to expect. Home – how would I define it? Is it the flat above the Meeting house? Is it a place in the US where I used to live? Is it wherever I am with my family?
I wasn’t surprised that Jennifer had looked at many sides of the question. She had worked with me in Quaker Homeless Action with the street homeless; she had worked with Quaker Social Action with émigrés far from their native lands, struggling to live in our country. But, she surprised me with the depth to which she had gone in exploring the variations on the word and then examining the reverse of the situation. With chapters on our bricks and mortar, our community, our borders and belonging, and our planetary home the book comes full circle: The O of Home.
Jennifer says: ‘In looking at the subject of home, we need to explore not just what it means for us as individuals, but also in the context of our communities, of our nations, and of our species. We need to consider not only what our outer houses mean, but those within.’
For me this led me to realise that if I am not happy in my own skin, I am not happy anywhere. Taking this idea further, outside bricks and mortar might shelter me physically but my soul needs a home as well. Looking at the reverse of what I would consider my home to be – with my husband, near my children – would be out on my own with no fixed abode. Many people live in this way, whether they are street homeless or refugees fleeing from something so scary that they need to leave their own place of safety.
Jennifer says: ‘Home is not static. Home is the balance between security and freedom; of belonging and longing. Home is both an end and a beginning.’
The O of Home made me think and reexamine my own presumptions of home.