Belonging- Part 2
“and say with our actions you belong.”
These words quoted from Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s poem, “For When We Greet Each Other” shaped my last blog. And ever since it has been distilling in my body-mind-spirit complex. Today this got a lot more real.
This morning, like all mornings I fill my tea kettle with fresh water, press boil, and place a “PG Tips” tea bag in my mug of choice. (For tea-mug geeks out there I chose a Glacier National Park mug, that is blue & white, with animal images splashed across it. It is well loved).
This day, as I wait for the water to boil, I hear the phrase, “and say with our actions you belong” at top volume, as if someone is shouting at me through my kitchen window. It continues to shout, penetrating through the shrill whistle of my tea kettle. I pour my tea and sense the words swirling around me—hot and urgent, just as the water surrounds and sinks the tea bag. Moments later as I stand witnessing the magic of said tea bag steeping, savoring the sensation of wet steam landing on my face and glasses, the words stop.
Like a hummingbird that stops suddenly to rest on a branch, letting all the effort of feeding and flying go, the phrase lands with a thunk. A welcome visitor to my weary menopausal body and taxed mental-emotional landscape. The resonance of these words were now vibrating on the inside.
As I turned my attention inward I heard a nuanced shift, taking the meaning deeper still.
AND SAY WITH YOUR ACTIONS— YOU BELONG!
At that moment, the lights came up in the dimly lit theater of my brain. Does the tea belong to the water? Does the finished product belong to me? Do my personal habits and actions add up to my own belonging? If so, how?
The vibration of this quote brought me to my knees. Not literally to the cold stone floor, thank you very much, but to the recognition of this truth.
If we don’t know what belonging is on the inside, we can’t act in ways that illicit belonging for anyone else. First, we must belong to ourselves.
This begs the question, what does belonging look like, feel like, taste like? How does this internal resourcing serve? When we finally belong to ourselves, how is our life different?
If you haven’t come up to speed on belonging, the down and dirty is here. Today we credit Brené Brown and Maya Angelou for teaching us that "You only are free when you realize you belong no place -you belong every place - no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great.”—M.A.
Brown takes this wisdom and puts it into a tidy package. She says, that we can’t look for belonging outside of ourselves, it is NO PLACE, as Angelou says. And that we belong —every place— when we belong to ourselves first. Whoa. To my knees, to my knees.
So if everything depends on treating each other well as our poet shares, then belonging begins with belonging nowhere except within.
Sipping my tea allowing this juicy download to percolate I am reminded. I have been here before. And some truths are worth repeating!
So today I move from a place of recognizing once again how vital my relationship to self is and can be. It is the source of what we do and the actions we take or choose not to take. I am not suggesting we only focus on ourselves and get lost in the self-obsessed world of “me, me, me and what about me!” You don’t have to look far to see the damage this mind-set is causing our world.
Instead keep asking yourself with whom do I belong to and can my home-base be belonging to myself? And what will it take to make this true? Think in terms of a moment of belonging, not a place of, “I’ve finally achieved belonging.”
And in those moments, when you feel the coolness of your in-breath and the warmth of your out-breath, find your body in time and space, you can belong. Right here, right now.
As Angelou and Brown suggest, once we belong here, we belong “every place.” Welcome Home.
If you’d like more conversations on belonging please let me know, it is a favorite of mine!
Much love & kindness,
Kari