Feeding our Roots - Finding Belonging

I hear a lot from people I work with about a sense of NOT BELONGING.

I see people struggling every day wanting to live an authentic life but continually running into this idea "I don't belong here so how can I be authentic". Whether it's here on this land, in this group, this body or whatever.

We live in a culture that has forgotten how to belong to one and other and to our land. We have grown up with the myth of the Rugged Individualist, thinking we have to go it alone, we’re better off alone, that we must go out and conquer something. It’s not clear what exactly, material wealth? Social status?

From my early childhood I've felt that I was an outsider. I lived back-and-forth between England and Scotland, in neither country fully during my crucial identify forming years. Forever traveling between a Scottish hill farm and an English boarding school - separated by just over one hundred miles and an enormous cultural chasm.

I found myself continually trying to figure out the rules and how to make it at least look like I fit in as truly fitting in seemed elusive. At ten I learned to change my accent - from North of England country to something more "southern England" and urban sounding because that was considered more desirable, a lot "posher"! I had no idea at the time that I was conforming to, and perpetuating, hundreds of years of Anglo oppression and drive towards hegemony. I just knew life was easier when I spoke the way the popular girls did.

When I moved to the US at 24 I got really good at shapeshifting - observing the culture then twisting myself to fit in. It's given me great gifts. I tend to be able to see things from a big picture cultural level rather than making it about individual people and I know that one worldview is just that - one of them. I don't need to buy into any of them particularly and can pull treasures from each.

But it leaves me wondering, WHERE do I belong?

And HOW do I belong?

These are some of those life questions that have burrowed into my bones and are working with me from the inside out. I've been digging into my ancestry as one route to belonging, finding the names, stories and places of those from my blood line.

I've been learning how to be in community - that's a hard one for an introvert who learned how to live alone at ten when she first went to boarding school.

I've been working with the different parts of myself, pulling some out of the shadows and getting to know them., building a relationship with the parts of myself I have denied for so long.

I now understand that I can't belong anywhere if I don't belong to myself.

And I've been working with the land under my feet. I've committed to this piece of land in the Southern Appalachian Mountains, one with as many layers of human history woven into it as the land has been folded into hollers, creeks, coves and peaks. I’m tending the plants and animals, digging in the earth, listening to the stories in the wind and those from my neighbors and learning more about what has happened here, what needs healing.

All this work with the inner and outer communities, the ancestors and the land have moved me closer to belonging.... to belonging here, to myself, to you, to my line.

I realized it's a practice, this belonging thing.

It's a daily re-rooting and trusting that my roots are held, nourished and watered.

This is some of the work I'll be sharing in The Road Ahead and Awakening the Wild Heart weekend retreat. I'd love to hear from you if you are interested in joining me and digging into your own roots.

Photo: Duddo Five Stones, just on the English side of the English-Scottish Border. From the Neolithic period. Land fought over for millennia. Who's to say who it belongs to?