Prayer for the New Year: True Belonging
/“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.”
~ Maya Angelou
In today’s Museletter, and my first poem for 2021, I begin by quoting the beloved poet and storyteller Maya Angelou about the nature of belonging. To start us off, I offer a few tantalizing lines from her 1973 interview with Bill Moyers. And then, as if that wasn’t evocative enough, I add in a dollop of insight from renowned researcher Brene Brown. And then I season my musings with a dash of provocative poetry from David Whyte.
In this process, I’ve steeped myself in their collective savory wisdom and allowed their words to simmer within me. Soon enough, my own new year poem bubbled up, and I am offering you a warm draft, a deep drink. Because in this potent moment, in this turn of the wheel, my New Year’s Poem is about invoking the northstar of true belonging. And I suspect I’m not alone in this heartfelt longing.
Almost half a century ago, Dr. Maya Angelou was interviewed on television by journalist Bill Moyers. From their engaging repartee, we are gifted these mighty words from Maya:
Maya Angelou: 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.
Bill Moyers: Do you belong anywhere?
Maya Angelou: I haven’t yet.
Bill Moyers: Do you belong to anyone?
Maya Angelou: More and more...I belong to myself. I’m very proud of that. I am very concerned how I look at Maya. I like Maya very much.
For me, that last line rocked me as much as her first line. Stunningly, at the golden age of 75 years old, Dr. Angelou said that more and more...she was belonging to herself.
Many years later, renowned author and speaker Dr. Brene Brown, known for her research on vulnerability, shame, and courage wrote the following, as she riffed off Maya Angelou’s quote above. Her research speaks to the paradox of true belonging:
“We confuse belonging with fitting in, but the truth is that belonging is just in our heart, and when we belong to ourselves and believe in ourselves above all else, we belong everywhere and nowhere.” ~ Brene Brown
For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt a profound existential homesickness, a deep longing to belong, searching for my place in the world, my true hearth of belonging.
Like a contemporary version of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, albeit with modern clothes and a far less schmaltzy sound track in the background, I’ve been traveling on my own metaphorical yellow brick road, searching for home and for true belonging.
And I hear a similar song of longing from so many others. So if we are to believe Brene Brown and Maya Angelou, the antidote for this existential homesickness, the deep healing medicine for what ails us, begins paradoxically with belonging to ourselves first and unequivocally. To stand in the center of our own lives.
This invitation and gauntlet is a provocative paradox. True belonging requires us to hold the simultaneity of, “Yes, and…” This is the dynamic tension inherent in both good improvisation and authentic belonging.
While trying to “fit in” is about conforming to an idealized image of what we think others want us to be and do. At its best, fitting in begets a false sense of belonging. Like a pretend guest crashing a wedding party, conformity is a well dressed impostor. When we try to fit in, we often work so hard at it, and that effort emits a subtle perfume of fear. Fitting in is not true belonging, it is performing.
Belonging requires vulnerability, authenticity, and courage. And like everything else that truly matters, it is a matter of the heart. It is ultimately and intimately about belonging to ourselves.
So here’s the thing about poets, we are besotted with paradox. It is the capacious currency of poetry. The sassy perspicacity that makes us sizzle. Paradox invites us to belong every place and no place. Paradox rocks us out of our comfort zones, carries us aloft on its syncopated offbeat. Asks us to be everywhere and nowhere, simultaneously both in and out. To belong to our own good hearts. To belong to one’s self, in order to belong to others, in freedom. The price is high. The reward is great.
These days, during the global pandemic, my version of the archetypal hero/heroine’s journey, my iteration of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, is a quiet internal depths journey, an inner yellow brick road to find my true place of belonging. And just like Dorothy, and Maya, and Brene I am beginning to discover that the heart of belonging resides inside my own aliveness, inside my creative joy, inside my own wild heart.
Which brings me now to one of my favorite poems by David Whyte, from his book, House of Belonging. This poem has been a touchstone for me throughout the years and now I gratefully share it with you below. Like all of my mentors, David Whyte points to the paradox of true belonging. How belonging requires and imbues freedom:
“You must learn one thing:
the world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.” ~ David Whyte, The House of Belonging
My Response to the Call of David, Dorothy, Brene, and Maya ~
A New Year’s Prayer for Freedom and Belonging
These days, I am swaddling myself in great swathes of solitude,
not only because we are in an ongoing global pandemic,
with so many of us sheltering in place, in order to keep the virus at bay,
I am also consciously choosing this hibernal time for going inward,
I am holding the simultaneity of apparent opposites, of being in and out,
tucked inside the darkness and sweet confinement of my aloneness.
Cuddling myself under the covers of an ongoing oppressive isolation,
I occasionally peer outside the duvet and nibble upon delicious morsels
of everyday miracles, viewed on zoom or relayed to me by text or phone,
from under my ethereal quilted blanket, inside a sacred tapestry woven metaphorically
for millennia by my ancestors, those who made me possible, stitched me together,
inside the darkness and sweet confinement of their aloneness.
In the stillness and silence of my own good company, I feel their longing,
I hear the whispers of those who came before me and live on within me,
the lineage and longing of those kinfolk, those souls who longed to belong,
who longed to be free, to go beyond fitting in, to belong to themselves,
to abide in a place among kin who celebrate the aliveness within each other,
and who harvest the darkness and sweet confinement of sacred aloneness.
This inherited longing to belong is etched indelibly in my own DNA,
and like a pregnant mama on the verge of giving birth, in that liminal space,
I perceive the stirrings of new life in my belly and a swelling of my heart,
budding resilient limbs of new beginnings pressing out from within,
tentative expressions of embodied wholehearted authentic belonging,
as I abide in the darkness and sweet confinement of my aloneness.
What I notice most in my quiet quest for belonging are micromovements,
paying loving attention as I track and tend my piquant appetites,
as I cultivate a gentle generosity of self blessing, appreciating a thirst for music,
acknowledging a hunger for silence, celebrating my craving for naps,
or the delicious longing for sour, bitter, sweet, or savory bursts upon my tongue,
savoring myself inside, the darkness and sweet confinement of aloneness.
And just as Ms. Angelou declared in that interview almost 50 years ago,
I too am concerned with how I look at myself, how I talk to myself,
how I hold myself in my own heart. I like myself very much.
And as I nourish myself one brush stroke at a time, one poem at a time,
one breath and footstep at a time, I discover I belong every place, I belong no place.
I belong to myself in the darkness and sweet confinement of my aloneness.
I belong and I am free...
