Create Harmony

Where You Feel Belonging, You Find Home

• Sally • Season 1 • Episode 149

Share episode

Send us a text

What if home isn’t a street address but a steady feeling that remembers you? We open the door to a quieter kind of living, exploring how gratitude, belonging, and gentle rhythms can turn ordinary moments into a refuge you can return to on purpose. Starting with the simple question of house versus home, we trace the deeper desire beneath our fall series on gratitude: a longing to be seen, safe, and fully ourselves. Along the way, we borrow a familiar storyline—the Hallmark small-town return—not for the romance, but for the rediscovery of essence and community that so many of us crave.

We break the idea of home into two layers. First, tangible places and practices that hold you: the worn chair that fits your shape, a candle at dusk, a slow cup of tea, a guided meditation that cues your breath to settle. Second, the inner room you carry wherever you go: a sentence of steadiness that says I am safe here, I belong here. By naming where you feel most like yourself, you begin to repeat and expand it. Gratitude becomes the amplifier, helping small moments of peace take root and grow into habits that lower stress and enrich connection.

A family cross-stitch blessing anchors the conversation with a vision worth pursuing: where you can be silent and still be heard; where sorrow is divided and joy multiplied. That is the kind of home we prioritize—one built by attention, laughter, and gentle courage rather than square footage. We close with a practical invitation to curate your own ecosystem of calm and, for those who want extra support, a look at our winter seasonal box created with Petal and Pink Mental Wellness Boutique, complete with five cozy guided meditations and tactile items that reinforce rest.

If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs a softer pace, and leave a review to help others find their way home.

To learn more, go to mycreateharmony.com

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome back to the Create Harmony Podcast. This is a space for finding your intentional rhythm, for savoring life's blessings, and we like to use the gift of imagination as a way of listening to God. So imagine yourself stepping into a space where the pace is unhurried, where the noise of the day begins to fade, and where you can hear the soft rhythms of nature guiding your heart. You can find that place right here. So this is episode 149, and I am your host, Sally Burlington. So at this point of the year, we are in the fall season of the year, and we always do a series that we call Great Fall. It's all about gratitude. Happens in the fall, so we call it Great Fall. And we're well into our Great Fall series right now. So we're going to continue that today, but we're going to talk about something that to me is kind of adjacent to gratitude. It's not exactly gratitude, but it is the concept of home, what home means to you. So that might seem like a departure from our other conversations about gratitude, but stick with me here. So this came up for me because over the last few months, our daughters have been in and out of our house. We have one that's already graduated from college and lives further away, and then our youngest one is in college. So neither of them live at home in air quotes anymore, but they come back and forth quite a bit. And it feels so good when they come home, when they're here in the w walls of this house. It just feels more complete and I love it and I want to cherish the time with them. But at the same time, I want them to have separate, well-adjusted lives. I want them to be happy. I want them to find a version of home outside of our household. So I kind of began asking myself the question of what is the difference between a home and a house? And you know, we all know a house, that's the structure, that's the walls, that's the furniture, that's the actual physical structure you live in. But a home goes way beyond that. So if we think about it in our culture, we talk about this a lot. For example, when someone dies, we say they went home to be with the Lord. We have, you know, in the Wizard of Oz, there's no place like home. It's this elusive place that we're all looking for. Country roads take me home. So I was just sort of thinking about what is that cozy home feeling? Now, if you grew up in a household that is really stressful, or if you currently live in a household that's pretty stressful, your physical house might not be the place that you feel most at home. But you still can find that cozy home concept somewhere in life. The best way to sort of flesh out this idea is to think about, I want you to just think about the Hallmark channel. If you've ever watched a Hallmark movie, if you've seen one, you've basically seen that storyline play out over and over again because all of them are pretty much the same. What happens in a Hallmark movie, in case you haven't ever seen one, is that there's a romance piece. So we're gonna kind of put the romance piece to the side. We're not gonna talk about that right here now. But generally, the main character comes from some big cold city where they don't really have a lot of touch points and not a community around them. They've come from some fast-paced, pr overproductivity-minded city, and they've come back to their town where they previously had felt loved and felt um embraced, and they're rediscovering their true essence and learning to live according to their own terms and just sort of coming back to themselves and able to shed some of the things that don't really serve them well. And if you don't currently live in a place like that, like we all want that, don't we? We all want a little bit more of that feeling of coming back to our true essence, of being able to truly embrace who God made us to be and to live according to our own terms. Regardless if you live in a small town or you live in a city, maybe it's not even your household that has that, but where could you find that essence? That's the question we're considering today. Is there a place that invites you into calm, into quiet corners where you can reset your psyche? Can you think of a place where you feel like you can be totally yourself? You're not performing, you're not tidying, you're not striving, you're just a being. This is a place where you can cry, or you could laugh, you can wander around half-dreaming. Home seems to be related to the sense of belonging. A place where you foot home seems to be related to a place of belonging, a sense of being where you fit, finding your tribe. And if you have any place like that in your life, even if it's just you're just there for a moment, that's where we circle back to gratitude. It's time to relish that place. It's time to cherish that state of being and really give thanks. And sometimes we have seasons in life where we are really only gonna catch a glimpse of that type of place. We're only gonna see it once in a while. But once you find it, you can hold on to that feeling. You can still dwell in that feeling, even if you aren't in the physical place that inspired that feeling, and you can create more space in your rhythms for that feeling to expand. Finding it for just a little while can give your soul a boost. And it's possible or maybe for you, your version of home might be something that you carry inside yourself. It's a steadiness. That steadiness says, I am safe here, I belong here. Home is a place that remembers you. It's like a blanket that warms you, a chair that holds your shape, or a photo that makes you smile even when you didn't mean to. Or maybe for you, home is less about where you are and more about how you are. I alluded to this earlier when I said home is something you carry inside yourself. It might be the feeling of permission, the feeling of belonging, the feeling of peace. And we all need more of that. So that's why we're taking some moments to dwell on home. Where do you find home so that you can consider where you could find more of it? The more you focus on something, the more it expands. So dwelling on it today is hoping that you can find that in a bigger part of your life. You'll have more luck knowing what it looks like and what it feels like, and you can draw yourself to it a little bit more. So, for our closing today, we've talked about home and gratitude all throughout. So I'm gonna share something that this is like a little reading that we have in our house, and let me explain. We have this um wall hanging, I guess it's called, and it's a cross stitch, you know. And if you don't know what cross stitch is, it's like a more old-fashioned thing, similar to Needle Point, except it's you do the stitches across one another. And it's something that was popular in the 70s, 80s. People did them. And somewhere in my husband's family, I think it was a great aunt, made this cross stitch for her sister, who was my husband's grandmother, and it always hung in my grandma, her his grandmother's house. And I really, really loved it. And when she passed away, we it came to live at our house. And at the top, it says the word home. And then it says, where you can be silent and still be heard, where you can ask and find out who you are, where people laugh with you about yourself, where sorrow is divided and joy multiplied, where we share and love and grow. May it be so. I just thought that that is such a beautiful sentiment and it hangs on our wall to remind us. Listen, go toward this. Put the pursuit of this kind of living at the top of your priority list because that is truly where you find riches. So go towards a place where you can be silent and still be heard, and you can laugh with you and about yourself. Go to it. Now, before we go, we've we've done our closing, but before we go, I want to remind you one more time that our seasonal series is happening. It's now available for purchase, so you can get it right now. If you go to mycreateharmony.com, you'll see more about that. But if you haven't heard about what our seasonal series is, it's a collaboration with our friends at the Petal and Pink Mental Wellness Boutique. And it's a seasonal box that you'll get one per season. We're currently um selling our winter boxes, and what's inside is a card that gives you a link to five guided meditations. And for the winter box, they're all cozy things. They're sitting by the fire or enjoying a cup of tea or reading in your cozy nook, and it feels like you're actually having those experiences when you listen to my voice through the guided meditation. And then the other things in the box are all different types of cozy items that help reinforce that idea and help lower your stress level and give you some calm. It's a great gift idea, would be a wonderful holiday gift for someone that you know would want a little bit more peace in their lives. And it's a great way to give a gift to yourself. It's a great self-care item that you could give to yourself during the busy holiday season. And the gift doesn't end right there because after this winter box, there'll be a spring box, a summer box, and a fall box. So you just, it's the gift that keeps on giving. So just go to mycreateharmony.com if you want to learn more, and you can get one today. And thanks so much for joining us today. Until next time, peace, you can see that we're gonna be able to do it.

Contributor

Sally Burlington

Host