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Belonging.
I have never felt like I belonged anywhere.
Call it a by-product of moving at some really key developmental times in my life, or maybe it’s simply in my personality to always take a step back and see a situation from outside, but, I’ve never fit.
In the UK, I’m too American, in the US, I’m too British. In spiritual communities I’m way too materialistic, and in communities that aren’t into woo-woo shit, I’m too weird.
I was chatting to a friend about it years ago.
She said ‘but have you ever thought that maybe you also fit everywhere?’.
I’d never thought about it that way before. But I’ve thought about it that way every day since.
What had felt like a burden up until that point, became a sort of freedom: maybe the goal is not to be a perfect fit for anywhere, but instead to be someone who touches down in various places, being at home in each of them.
When it comes to the work I do: re-connection, re-weaving, re-membering… my irreverence has sometimes felt like a thing that didn’t fit. How can I be so deeply immersed in this world of magic and wonder, teaching other people how to remember their way back into it, and also… snarky. Thorny. Materialistic. Irreverent. Playful.
How can I sit with a tree and let it show me all the other worlds its connected to, or be turned inside out by making eye-contact with a raven, and then, I dunno, get so excited about a new dress (DRESSES!)?
In a world where it seems very important to have a clear ‘brand’ or a strong opinion about anything, and to take a stance and pull a Gandalf vs. Balrog about, well, everything, I’m somewhere in between. I see you. I see you too. I can’t commit the entirety of my being to standing behind many things, except for maybe the Magic itself. And dresses.
It used to plague me. I wanted a place so badly. To be able to put a stake in the ground that grew into roots. To become a tree, or even a mountain. I saw the places in my past where I had been pulled out of the tapestry of a place and a community and it was like a wound that had never fully healed: a place that I could squeeze myself back into if I wanted to, but that would never fit right again. I’d watch my friends who never left, who continued on their timelines and felt this longing for a home that had never really been mine to begin with. From this perspective I hated my wounds, because they were arrows pointing towards the places that I’d never fully belong again.
Sitting with the earth one day, it showed me the picture that I had been missing all along:
I am already in my place. It was never meant to be about becoming a tree or a mountain. It was never about belonging in one place, or having an easily identifiable 'brand' or an elevator pitch. It was never about having a single perspective. I dwell in the place of multitude. Nuance. Liminality. Everywhere and nowhere. I’d been spending years trying to fit myself back into a sweater that was two sizes too small without noticing the cloak made of stars hanging behind me, waiting to be put on.
Focusing on what I could no longer be, instead of what I actually was.
The wound wasn’t an arrow pointing towards the places I’d never fit again, but a doorway into a vast world of un-knowing.
I am not remotely alone: there are millions of us who don’t fit anywhere; who fit everywhere.
Milan Kundera, in one of his books (I can’t remember which, though I think it might be Testaments Betrayed) wrote about how when you move from your homeland, your roots dry up. They never quite work right again after it’s happened, but then, over time, the most miraculous thing happens: your roots start to sprout inside yourself.
An island floating in the sky: still a part of the Web, but not in place. A tree, with roots in this world, but existing simultaneously elsewhere. The croak of a raven circling overhead: cut out of the bright sky like a shadow being cast as it travels through the Web of infinite realities to briefly make eye contact and remind us how small we are, how little we know, how vast the universe, how beautiful the great mystery of the un-knowing, of the always-belonging.
Big hugs,
Rebecca
ps. Thorn Magic boxes! 3/4 gone. You want one? Get urs here.
Hi! I'm Rebecca
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