A house is just as it states. It is a place that has four walls and a roof. If you are lucky, the house might have heat for the Winter and air conditioning in Summer. A house, is still just a house, until you, yes, you, make it into a home.

Like your body, you can dress it up. Get the best of the best when it comes to furnishings. Make the house look beautiful from the inside and out, but beware, the best of the best still doesn't make a home.

Some of the best homes I have been lucky to see in my lifetime were places most would never walk in. A home can have flaws and rusty pipes. It can have black toilets you are afraid to use anytime in your life. How clean a house is, just like your body, doesn't make it into a home.

Homes come from inside yourself. They come from every memory you ever had. You bring these memories into your soul one by one. Not all memories have to be good for it to still be your own special place.

You start with a base, the furniture let's say. You build on by adding in the memories that mean the most to you. Pictures drawn on a refrigerator are the perfect example of adding the good with the bad. When making those pictures, paint spilled, tears were cried, and tempers were lost. Naps are taken, messes cleaned up.

Soon those same hand-drawn pictures bring a smile to your face when you open the refrigerator door. Five years later you lovingly take those same pictures down and wish you could do it all over again.

A home is a place you feel comfortable and safe in. It should be a place where you want to be when everything in your life goes wrong. A place filled with items and memories that you can call on when in need. The items don't have to be large or expensive to have meaning to you and help make you feel safe. It can be just as simple as looking at a dent on a wall and smiling in memory of how that came to be.

All homes have good and bad, this is planet Earth after all. A balance must be there for each of us to learn everything you will need to survive.

Whether you live in a cardboard box or the biggest house ever built, if it's not filled with what is inside you, your soul, of course, it soon becomes just an empty shell and you will too. When you surround yourself with objects that have no meaning to you, soon you will start to lose a bit of yourself. Each day that goes by, where you can not find your inner soul, what really means most to you, you will start to feel lost.

Life becomes easy to hide from. Life becomes harder the more you live inside yourself. Embrace who you are. Be proud of your home. It does not matter if your home is your body or you are lucky enough to have a structure.

A home is where you invite people in. A place they feel comfortable sharing themselves with you, even if it's just an empty space you are standing together in.

All the memories you pack into a building are also packed into your soul. Don't be afraid to lose them if you ever have to leave a structure you once called home. No matter where you might be, take a look inside yourself, all that is in you makes your body your home.

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