My recent trip to India had me exploring a life long theme for me of belonging. Having moved from the UK to NZ as an 8 year old with my parents and two older brothers my sense of belonging socially ruptured pretty early on, if it was ever there at all. It’s not that I didn’t feel an inner belonging though. A felt sense of belonging to, with, and as nature is one of my earliest memories. It was a rare family drive in the countryside in spring, we stopped to care for the needs of my brother’s car sickness. A forest emerged from a sea of bluebells accented in bright green bathed in dappled light and cool air. I felt so connected to this place, felt it deep in my bones, and was sad to be whisked off to ice cream at the busy seaside town. The treat for me that day was that quiet nourishment of the forest and I carry the embodied experience with me.
With my parents both passed away and estrangement from one of my brothers, belonging as it might be offered by family and bloodlines continues to be absent. I have moved continents and countries many times so it has been hard for the land to know me and for me to know it, it has been hard to cultivate lasting friendships and a chosen family.
This stay in Tasmania is the longest of my life. It is here I have really felt a sense of belonging to country in my bones, a belonging anchored strongly in receiving the words of Aboriginal man AJ King when in a smoking ceremony he declared, “you have a place here’. My tears of relief surprised me as they flowed as if never ending. The experience on country in the central highlands had echoes of that child in the forest with bluebells. I feel it in my bones, and it continues to be embodied in me.
What I realise is that a deep sense of inner belonging has been a quest. When family and place did not offer it, I have turned to the spiritual, with explorations of Kashmir Shaivite philosophy most intensively, and wholistic practices where body, mind, and heart are seen as one, intraconnected with all of life, all elements, across time and space. From an absence of belonging (one of three inherent human needs according to Staci Haines) has come my work and joy in the world, and for that I am grateful.
Still, in me is the yearning to belong to and with people, a tribe, a family. Having created family by birthing two daughters we have created a little pod of belonging which is precious beyond words. The generous Aboriginal welome to country has settled me, softened my striving to be good enough to fit in and be wanted, and made it possible to lean into a natural belonging with others. This recent trip to India had me reflecting that when we are together, in nature, watching a sunset, walking trails, sitting on the earth, we naturally belong to the earth and to one another and we all feel it.
… and here, on the theme of belonging, is a poem written by Aboriginal woman Carlie Atkinson and read by me … enjoy.
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