Home. It’s just bursting with comfort and pleasant things to do.
Walk into my dance studio, make your way to the back of the building and turn left. After a few yards, there’s a sliding door to your left that doesn’t really slide anymore. It does, but you have to be careful to keep it on the tracks. Behind the door, there are stairs leading to the basement and to the immediate right of the basement stairs, there’s another door.
Behind that door is my safe haven: A tiny, ugly room with a garage-sale bookshelf, a collpased couch, heavy puke-yellow curtains covering two cinderblock walls, and a keyboard. Every Thursday from 5 PM to 5:30 PM, this is my safe haven. The voice room. I get to spend half an hour pretending my mom’s not going to yell at me next time I see her, forgetting that my friends are mad at me and my dad hates me and my director told me I could be replaced and I’m just not good enough. It’s just me and my incredible voice teacher, me singing my heart out and him with his perfect balance of praise and criticism and no judgement. It’s fantastic. Just walking into the room and taking off my shoes makes me more relaxed.
some tibetan buddhist monastaries in tibet. a completely different world. talk about getting grounded.
hearing the long horns echo when the stars are stll out, monks gathering in the monastary lit by hundreds of butter lanps, the tantric chanting, dawn slowly breaking - it’s magical
Really? I’ll have to rent it - I’ve only seen bits and pieces of it, never the entire movie.
My grandparents summer cottage on the shores of Silver Lake, in Perry NY.
Well, when they were alive and I was young. An absolutely beautiful 1920s craftsman cottage, with a large fieldstone fireplace, a deep house wide front porch looking out at the lake, and surrounded by huge ancient trees.
Now? some jerkwad bought it about 15 years ago ‘as an investment’ and has let the place fall apart. They dont live there in teh summer, or even do much other than pasture a horse on its 9 acres [they havent maintained the tiny apple orchard or even mown the lawn in a decade.] The boathouse was painted onm only hte parts seen from on teh water, and anything done mainetnance wise is purely cosmetic [they slapped paint over damaged soffits, and repainted the little workshop building, but if you peek inside you can see the gaping hole in teh roof and the3 foot deep drift of rotting leaves that have fallen through the hole in the roof annually.]
MrAru and I snuck over in november and looked the property over, and discussed amtters with my dad, and we could probably buy all 9 acres [600 footage of lakefront] for about $120KUS. sigh and then it would probably take another $50KUS to renovate it to a year around home for us to retire to. SO we at least have a goal for the next 20 years we have until mandatory retirement age - pay off the farm[$50K to go] and buy/renovate the property, and try to get it as close to paid off as possible.
Mmmm, yes. I got my license at 29 and before that was a slave to the train or bus. Now I can just get up and go if I want.
Also, I just inherited a 30-year-old broken-in nest of a plush sectional and it’s hard to leave that space.
I stare at Thomas Kinkade paintings. 
What a shame about your family cottage – I love craftsmans and it sounds like it was a beautiful place in its heyday. But I was so glad to read that you are planning to recover it in the future. One of the reasons we bought our cottage is because I had spent every summer growing up on our lake (we didn’t buy our family’s former cottage, but one on the same bay) and it’s worth every penny. It will never make anything as an “investment” but I am fully planning to pretty much die and decompose on the property before I’d ever sell it.
The cottage is one of the main reasons I love craftsman homes. It has pleasing proportions, and the wrap around 3 sides porch got turned into 2 side porches [ a sleeping porch, and a casual dining porch] and the deep front porch. 2 bath, 3 bedrooms and a killer livingroom that is the entire front of teh cottage. It has a 2 car garage, a 1 car garage for teh tractor, a 1 car garage sized workshop and a 2 car sized boathouse. It has a grass tennis court that hasnt been rolled in 30 years, and a small orchard of 9 ancient apple trees. Like I said, 9 acres that would give us the ability to grow enough fruits and veggies to be fairly [produce wise] self sufficient as we both love to cook and have killer sauce and pickle / preserve recipes. We even discussed inviting my brother to live with us [he is 2 years older than I am] once both our parents die. It really is a damned shame there isnt anywhere within 50 miles to work for mrAru or myself=( We would try to sell teh farm and buy the property and move there right now if we could.
Probably my townhouse comes the closest. What keeps it from being a total haven is that every now and then I can hear the bass from a neighbor’s stereo, and sometimes it’s kinda loud. It never lasts very long or happens very late, but that lack of control over what I hear keeps me from being able to completely escape the outside world.
Most of the time, though, I don’t hear anything from either neighbor, and I can lock the doors and close the blinds and just be – read, play the piano, watch a DVD, do little things around the house, whatever I feel like. I can even go outside if the mood strikes me. 
(Though my patio is kind of useless, which might also contribute to it not being a total haven because I do enjoy being able to sit outside and read on nice days. Today would have been kick-ass. :()
Mine’s a conjunction of time and place
Summerfest.
At the end of June, on 75 acres along Lake Michigan, it’s an eleven day music festival that draws 80,000 to 120,000 people per day. It sounds crazy, I know, to have a haven in such a large crowd of people.
But if you live in the upper Midwest, you know how hard cabin fever sets in. The city kind of goes a little bit goofy, needing to be outside almost all the time. whatever we do, it’s called a fest, and it’s outside. With beer.
I take off from work early on the first couple of days and spend the afternoon just wandering around, listening to bands and drinking a few beer, but mainly just sitting in the sun and watching people. Sometimes I run into friends, sometimes not. But in the warmth, with no deadlines, no pressures, no phones, the Big Lake, and live music… it’s like everything that happens all year just melts away.
Almost every year, around September or October, I get an urge to go back to Summerfest that is strong enought to bring tears to my eyes.