The Cult of Normality
has had its turn.

A red sun on the horizon.

Standing on a beach at sunrise, broken and uncertain, Tim Ruth found that the red sun on the horizon drew a smile despite everything. In that moment he recognised something: the capacity for awe does not require conditions. It requires only attention.

That is the church HOME is built inside — not a building, but an orientation. Not a religion, but a reverence. The founding philosophy draws on Tim's forthcoming book, Into the Wow: Mystery in an Age of Normality.

An enterprise, not a community.

Community cannot be built. It can only be allowed to arise. This is not a slogan — it is the argument at the heart of M. Scott Peck's book on the subject, and it shapes how HOME talks about itself. Peck spent decades studying groups that called themselves communities, and concluded the word describes something closer to a state of grace than a structure.

So this is what HOME actually claims to build. A team — the people doing the work. A tribe — what that team, and everyone gathered with it at any one time, may grow into. An enterprise — a business, a service, a sanctuary, the physical structures and daily practices that bring people together and exchange with the world.

Community itself is never on the blueprint. It is what may arise, unbidden, once the conditions are right — and it is not something any brochure, including this one, can promise.

What HOME is built on.

HOME offers a kind of retirement — to everyone in it.

Not only to those who come for fasting and end-of-life care. Also to those arriving to give birth, to move through midlife, and to the team building and running the place itself. Retirement here is not an end point reserved for later. It is a standing invitation.

Since the industrial revolution, effort and employment have become the same word. Time is something we sell for money, and over a few hundred years a quiet resistance has grown up around the idea of effort spent on anything we simply love. Work has come to mean survival, and for millions of people it has become a dirty word.

It was not always this way. For most of human history, once food and shelter were secured, people gave hours and hours of their time to building — monuments, homes, art, craft. None of it was called work. It was simply what humans liked to occupy themselves with.

HOME exists in part to re-establish that relationship with creativity.

As industrialisation and automation continue to threaten conventional jobs and the old logic that survival depends on selling one's time, learning to move from work into play stops being a luxury and becomes a skill everyone eventually needs. HOME is a place to practise it now.

HOME is an experiment.

It is a business, yes — a scalable model, a network in the making, a care enterprise with a financial architecture designed to sustain itself and replicate across the country and eventually the world. All of that is true and intentional.

But underneath the business is a question. The oldest question modern human beings are asking, in a thousand different ways, with increasing urgency: is it possible to live differently? Not as an act of rejection or retreat — but as an act of recovery. To recover a natural and native state of mind. An indigenous relationship with the land. A sense of personal divinity held within an infinite mystery.

HOME is an attempt to find out.

Low-impact buildings. Regenerative agriculture. Health practices that genuinely sustain. Rituals — like walking barefoot on the earth at sunrise — that bring people together and simultaneously optimise the biology of everyone present. A daily life designed around the elements: fire, water, earth, air. A living, celebrating connection with the forces that made us and to which we will one day return.

The tribe is not something we invent here. It is something we remember.

Restoring what modernity took.

The human body evolved in intimate relationship with the earth's electromagnetic field, the cycles of light and dark, and the unmediated energies of the natural world. Modern life has disrupted almost all of this simultaneously — artificial light after dark, perpetual wireless radiation, synthetic materials underfoot, and a near-total severance from direct contact with soil, water, and sky.

HOME treats the restoration of this relationship not as a lifestyle preference but as a health imperative. Bare feet on the earth in the morning. Eyes open to the horizon at sunrise. Wired rather than wireless connections. Buildings designed to breathe. A tribe that goes to sleep when it gets dark and wakes when the light returns.

This is not primitivism. It is biology. The body knows what it needs when it is given the conditions to remember.

A health and safety manual for spiritual ecstasy.

The Into the Wow ceremony is the living heart of HOME's philosophy — enacted at least once a week, and spontaneously whenever the tribe feels called. Nothing is hidden. There is no trip being laid on anyone. The explanation exists so that when the ceremony starts, it can simply happen.

To die well is the final act of a life fully lived.

In dominant culture, death is something that happens to you — managed by strangers, medicated into invisibility. HOME proposes something older and more humane: that dying is a passage to be participated in, and witnessed by the people who love you.

The first HOME.
Brighton, 2012.

The vision of HOME was first tested in an urban setting — a large Victorian house in Brighton, opened in 2012 as a gathering hub and open learning centre. It ran courses and workshops, welcomed people from the local area, and attempted in a modest but genuine way to create a model of integrated living focused on lifelong learning and a radically new paradigm for human flourishing.

It did not yet include the doula and transitional care aspects that now sit at the heart of HOME. The meditation circle, the communal kitchen table, the shared sleeping rooms — these were the beginning. The seed. A year of lived experiment before the landlord sold the property and the project came to an end.

What that year taught became the foundation of everything that followed — and the seed of a book: Into the Wow: Mystery in an Age of Normality, by Tim Ruth, to be published very soon.