Belonging
3 January 2006
Napa, CA
Somehow I managed to do it again! I was late again getting to the meditation session in Santa Rosa last night. This time it was due to the road closed across the mountain from Saint Helena. That – the closed road and all the recent flooding - is one explanation. The other, more valuable, explanation is that I am learning about belonging, and it is a long and difficult lesson.
What is most important for me to capture here, though, is the process I am watching unfold. Almost magically, I arrived at the meditation last night at the exact same time as the week before – fifteen minutes late. Only this time, rather than walking around the neighborhood for a bit less than a half hour waiting for the meditation to end, I sat and meditated on a bench near the back door. I sat with the feeling of being an outsider. I also sat with the koan that John, the Zen teacher, gave me last week – The whole world is medicine. My mind turned on the word “medicine” – its healing quality. Healing led me to health, and health brought me to home, and home brought me to belonging – right where I started from.
I began to feel a sense of home as a field that neither moves nor stays still. I also began to experience belonging as a kind of granting permission. Not just granting myself permission, but also receiving permission from others who are in this field. I was not at all aware of the what in all this – the granting permission to do? To just be? To belong? Not at all sure. And then I realized that as long as I am open to accepting that permission, it is always open to me. It may be just as true that belonging is a gift I give to others as much as a gift I receive from others.
“Belong” comes from the Middle English word belongen. And longen means “to be suitable”. In ancient days suitable meant something different than it does today. Then suitable meant “similar, matching”. Its last vestige, I guess, is the four suits in a deck of cards. There still was the sense of “fit”, but maybe back then fit was a bit tighter than now.
There is some important learning for me here. Just as I am never “exactly the size I am” (as an old companion of mine would say), the fit may not be exact either. When I pay attention to my breathing, I am aware of how my body is constantly changing shape, how it expands and contracts with each breath. I – this material self – is no less ephemeral than my constantly shifting emotional self, or emotional body, or my spiritual self for all that.
And just as I am never exactly the size I am, my clothes – this “suit” I wear, is never exactly the size it is either. The next time I look at a label with a garment’s size, I hope I stay aware that this is their size only when the garments are not breathing.
Just as a good suit is forgiving as my body changes size and shape in every moment, so it is with a community of belonging. Maybe belonging is a kind of conspiracy where everyone who belongs is breathing together, where everyone gives permission to all the many selves who show up in the constant expansion and contraction to just show up, and expect no more than that.
So, there I was sitting on the bench next to the back door sitting with belonging. There came a moment when I chose to break another of my well-worn patterns. As quietly as I could, I entered the house through the back door and went into the kitchen. I sat in a chair next to the kitchen table. The kitchen was perfect in its ordinariness as a kitchen – comfortable in its familiarity. And then in that moment I found some peace. I found in that moment that I was exactly where I belonged – right on the edge, right at the boundary of belonging.
Had I chosen to stay out there on the little patio, I would have ploughed another well-tilled field. And I somehow knew that going into the living room with the others would have been a tight fit in that moment, and so would not have been suitable.
It was then that I realized that only in that moment did I belong on the periphery, in the vestibule of my own house. In that moment I also remembered the vestibule in my grandmother’s house. It was a place of transition – a place to take off my jacket and boots on a winter afternoon, a place for me to become comfortable with belonging.
A bench is medicine. So is a kitchen chair. And a vestibule. The whole world is medicine.