TEREZUM

What does having a home means for you? For a lot of folks a house means safety, nurturing, love, caring, well being. I guess that this is the innate need for certainty and comfort, one of the basic needs of any human, according to Maslow’s pyramid of human needs.

But we all know that a building called home can become a nightmare, a prison. Think of the couples that hate to be with each other. The thought of going back to that place after work terrifies them so they would rather bury themselves in piles of paper work than to go home. Think of those who divorce or those who are living in a rented place that they dislike, but as it was the only thing they could afford they are stuck there. So a home is not just a building for providing shelter. A home is a feeling, a state of mind. You can be at home and feel terrible. So it is not the place per se as much as the company that you have and your own mental state while being there.

I have thought of this theme while working on my latest illustration called “ Home is inside”. I used the snail to depict the idea of a home. The carrots are a metaphor for our old thinking, for the paradigms that keep us stuck in the same mentality. Inside the snail’s shell there are fungi growing, building their own mini ecosystem.

We have a tiny creature that slides on a piece of carrot like it would be a surfer and we can notice that the fungi have windows and a ladder as a way to get there. We use the ladder in order to level up our thinking and to reach a place called home independent of the location, of the surroundings. You see, you can be homeless or live in a terrible place yet if you are well rooted, like a carrot, in yourself, you can feel at ease.

You take your resilience and your inner peace wherever you go so I believe that this is the real HOME that we all need to find and keep. Just like the snail travels all over with a shell this is how we can all be when we are no longer confined by the limitations of our old beliefs. Our inner ecosystem is building his own ladder and let the fungi grow: resilience, peace, confidence, harmony, inner purpose, motivations.

These are all structural parts of the house we can build inside ourselves.

I have used watercolour and my 0.1 mm rotring isograph to work on the piece of art.