Just when I start to wonder if I’m still on track, when it all starts to feel too slow, too self-centred and not getting anywhere, some-one asks “where is the somewhere else that we’re rushing to get to?”
I spend a morning with writers going nowhere and looking very closely at where we are. We look at flowers, at birds, at grass, at what is growing in the depths of the bank, at what is growing in the depths of us.
Someone had brought in a walnut sapling, tiny, in a pot. There was a story to it…but as the morning went on the story faded into the background as the sapling, in its pot, sat in the middle of our circle, while we came and went. What would it have made of us, these chattering creatures that emanated so much love when its story was first told and welcomed it into the circle, centre-staged it, but then came and went, for hours, and left it there alone, centred among empty chairs?
Or maybe not…maybe I wasn’t the only one who focussed as much attention on it, as on what was happening around it.
I do wonder about trees, about what they think and feel, whether they love their slow, rooted lives or if they envy the birds that make homes in their branches for a split-second of the year and then fly off again.
I wonder whether they notice the shedding of their leaves any more than we notice the shedding of our skin. Or if it hurts.
Sometimes, I look at the young holly growing under the ancient oak and wonder if either one, just once in a while, wishes it were the other.
Today though, I looked at the walnut sapling and it looked back, and neither of us said anything – not to each other at least. We both spoke to the circle, to the room, to the gathering, and all of them spoke back. Some giving bits of themselves away, hesitantly or stridently or with self-deprecating humour; others declined and held their own centres closed.
Perhaps some of us are destined to be trees, quiet and steadfast, while others are birds, chattering and ready to fly off at any moment. If that’s true, I’m still not sure which I might be.
Brought up on maps and travellers’ tales, I’ve always been conscious that there is always something, somewhere, else. Another story to weave my way into, another culture, another landscape, another sight and sound and scent.
I have always felt an absence of belonging, a refusal to fit-in before I even knew that was not the same thing. But the weight of unbelonging has varied.
Is there some physical law that says that bodies in motion are lighter than those at rest? The pack feels heaviest when you first hoist it on to your back; a few miles in you scarcely feel it. Un-belonging is like that. When you’re on the move, you’re choosing not to belong, you’re a deliberate stranger, which is a light way to walk through the world. It is only when you settle, and still feel the strangeness of others, that the weight makes itself felt.
For a long time, I felt it most of the time, because most of the time, I was stationary, doing what was required, earning a living, living in relationships with others that weren’t always functional. All of that was liveable, because it had its own rewards, but also because of the periods when I could shrug it off my shoulders and hoist on a pack instead: a daysack, or a backpack, didn’t matter. It is only at this remove that I fully recognise that I was most ‘myself’ when I stepped outside of what passed for ‘my life’.
I was never a nomad, never an explorer. I didn’t “go travelling” – I went on holiday, or I went walking, or I went on holiday to go walking. Even so, technically, it counts as travel and (from this remove) it is the travelling – my own and other peoples – that defines me. The one thing I always wanted to do, the one thing I still want to do, even if I have to keep re-defining what it means.
I didn’t intend to stop travelling. I took a couple of years off to do my Master’s degree. The firm would not pay my tuition fees, so my holiday fund had to. Then Clive died and there were things to do, like sorting out the mess he left behind, like loving him still, like having a mad affair to convince myself I was still alive, like grieving and mourning and reconfiguring the life I still wanted to live, once I’d worked out what that actually was. Like finding someone(s) who could help me figure that out.
Then there was a global pandemic, and no-one was going anywhere. During that time, I made choices which meant the world had to get over itself before my going out there again would be feasible…by which time…
it seemed to me that I had settled.
I had found people, places, spaces. I had started to belong, which still comes as a surprise – as does much of this phase of my life. The sign in my hallway which reminds me that my ideal life is now my reality doesn’t have space for the coda that this was never the imagined ideal.
The sign is there because I, still, need the reminder. I’m as wont to whinge as the next dissatisfied soul, so I keep the sign where I will see it many times a day, not to tell me anything, but to ask me, subtly, “Okay, accepting that there are these imperfections, these gaps, these still unmanifest desires, which part of the abundance here and now will you give up to change that – to fill the
gaps, manifest more, invite the missing into this already ideal life?”
Everything has a price.
Ideal does not equal Perfect.
Or, to accept the paradox: my Ideal includes Imperfect.
It includes the gaps – the spaces for strangers to step into, for growth to occur, for the no-longer wanted to be deposited.
My answer to the question is: nothing.
Not “no thing” – I am still in the process of curating my home, giving up actual things on an almost daily basis. But the flow of my life, the security of my life, the path & way of my life, the ongoing adventure of it, that I will not give up.
Settled, then, I find is also an uncertain word. I’m trying to find my own definition of it, just as I’m trying to find my own definition for belonging, to work out that, maybe, for me, it does not have the boundaries, the inclusivity/exclusivity of a cult, or a team, or even a community.
Maya Angelou said: “You are only free when you realize you belong no place—you belong every place — no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great,” I haven’t read the whole interview, so I take her words out of context, but I suspect that the reason I had this sense of unbelonging was that I thought I needed to belong to “one” place and that did not fit with so many parts of who I am.
When people ask where I’m from, I still start with my birthplace before mentioning where I’ve lived for the last forty-odd years…and I still want to claim my mother’s heritage from another place to my father’s.
When I think about how much I love my home, it is only partly about “being” here; it is just as much about it being here for me to come back to.
When I think about friendships and community, I see that I am not building or entering a group or a community. By being open to all the aspects of myself and valuing my disparity, I seem to be like one of those young men on the streets in modern Jordan, outside of the ruins, slowly putting together beautiful mosaics, building something cohesive from fragments. Slowly. There is no rush to finish the piece. Sitting in the street, in the sun, talking to passing strangers, while still somehow focussed on finding the next right piece, the colour of it, the shape and size of it, the maybe chipping it a bit if needed, to create the pattern and the picture.
Like Angelou, there is something in me that desperately wants “to belong”, but it is outweighed by the part of me that wants “to be free”.
On my vision board there is a picture, among others, of a tree sculpted into the image of a serene oriental being and, underneath it, I've added the words Rise Up Rooted. I want to be rooted, but I also want to rise up. I cannot decide if I am tree or bird, because I want to be both.
There is nowhere I need to rush off to, but there are still many places that I want to go, even if only so that I can return from them, having learned something – or met someone – or experienced or understood – or found a new question – I want to go, because I have no idea what I will find. I want to return so that I can work out what it might have been.
As for belonging…I know what I always knew: it is not about fitting in, it is about finding the places where you fit, where you are accepted by default, because you are you. And I am only just beginning to understand what I didn’t always know: we can belong everywhere and nowhere or in one place or in many. We can sit at the table and build our own beautiful mosaic of a life. From fragments.
