Belonging: Remembering Ourselves home

In the act of connecting to archetypes we feel the spark of vitality, a hint of life, a tiny becoming.

By honouring what is out of reach, we preserve our own wonder. And it is this wonder that keeps us responsible to the things under our stewardship. This slow kind of learning requires us to stay put, to live many seasons in relationship with a place so that we may come to know its fragrances and particularities, preferences, and gifts. In this way,

Her being different serves to bring the family or group to consciousness where it has been living too long in the dark.

When we weave our threads together, we become response-able for each other. Which is to say, we now have the ability to respond to the other’s experience as if it was, in some way, our own.

The healthy circle of belonging welcomes conflict and dissonance as the early warnings they are: signalling change and calling for growth. Your rebellion is a sign of health. It is the way of nature to shatter and reconstitute. Anything or anyone who denies your impulse to grow must either be revolutionized or relinquished.

So long as we are unwilling to brave towards our personal edge, we won’t be drawing creativity from our origins but simply imitating those who have gone before us.

This reciprocal relationship with the land upon which we dwell is so essential to our practice of belonging. For those who live in urban centres, it is important to adopt even a small patch of green, whether it’s on a balcony or rooftop or in a community garden plot, and begin to learn its ways. Learning might even begin with something as quiet as

What we really want is a relationship, a dialogue, a conversation with that place within us which always remains essentially mysterious.

The inner critic, a spokesperson for all the diminishing voices in our past and in our culture, is the first gatekeeper of true belonging. It barrages us with “buts.” “But you don’t have anything original to say.” “But you can’t prove that.” “But you will look or sound ridiculous.” “But you aren’t as talented as X,” and