Building a Fire Together

On Longing and Belonging

Starting in November of last year, I became part of a year-long online community centered around myth, animacy, and ecology. It’s my dream subject matter, and I’ve loved the experience, even as I’ve struggled to keep up. Each week there’s a new point of focus, a different myth to study, a companion somatic practice, and an opportunity to gather and discuss the material online. All of this organized and led by a person who’s work and care for the world I deeply respect. As a bonus part of the program, I was also invited to attend an in-person immersion on the north shore of Kauai, which I’ve just returned home from.

There’s a tension I experience in many group ecologies, but certainly those that have some element of the spiritual about them. A bit of a wariness. In truth, I long to be in spaces where we collectively acknowledge the great mystery of being, groups that can agree we humans are comprised of Spirit at least as much as we’re comprised of matter/eventual worm food. I want for communities of depth where we wonder together about the sacred aliveness of this planet, about what it means to have a soul, about the power of beauty and art.. And… I find that it takes attention and care for me to find my ease in these spaces. I will inevitably encounter an outsider aspect of myself, and in order to be present in these groups, I’m obliged to hold a tension some where between my longing and my belonging.

I don’t believe I’m alone in this. If my closest peers or coaching clientele are representational at all, it seems most of us carry the mark of the outsider to greater or lesser extent, regardless of whether or not we were the last kid to be chosen for the kick ball team. Most of us have fantasized at some point about having been mislaid in the wrong family, home, school, or town. Even in the punk scene—a community literally created and populated by outsiders—I know none of us was immune to feelings of loneliness and longing.

But I want to wonder about something, particularly as I seek to foster spaces where outsiders might come together to contemplate the mysteries. What if the longing and loneliness are okay? What if we brought the loneliness and longing along with us as our welcome companions? Might we allow ourselves to orient towards this outsider feeling less as an example of our never really belonging, and more as a poignant and even necessary part of this human dance?

The Kauai group gathered in a sunny yurt on the very breathtaking land where Jurassic Park was filmed. The thoughtfulness and care of the circle was palpable from the moment I entered. As I’ve noticed in all such comings together, there are certain archetypes that show up, certain jargons, and codes. In my early experience with such circles, these codes and jargons were a signal for me to detach. But now, I recognize this as the very human stuff of connection. I recall that punk had its own patois and uniforms, just like a formula one racing group, or a circle of new mothers would. In each of these cases, humans are doing the very human thing of attempting to organize around an axis.

We were attempting to organize around in axis in Kauai. Wild-life biologists, school teachers, artists, poets. An odd punk. Orphans most of us, of traditions and customs and axes largely lost to time. And what I felt in our gathering together was the palpable longing for return to some shared orientation point—a fire we might gather around—right next to the loneliness of exile that we all carry to greater or lesser extent here in the west. Which is to say, I wasn’t the only one who arrived there with her longings intact.

It’s dear to me that one of the exercises we took part in together was to actually build a fire by hand. On an open, windy plain, each of us was given a spindle, a notched hearth board, and a nest of dry grass. Through repeated trial and error, we all got our hearth board smoking at least. Many of us were able to knock a little ember made of ash from the board into our dry grass and actually bring a fire to life. This was thrillingly primal in ways I couldn’t anticipate. But there was also something adorable, and dare I say evolved about a group of former strangers taking turns at this art. Here were our syncretic, sometimes clumsy manners in relationship to the sacred. And yet, here we also were, warming ourselves around a fire we made together.

So what about this? Maybe the longing and belonging are not so opposed as we’re so often made to feel. Here’s what the master teacher on death and elderhood—Stephen Jenkinson has to say on the matter:

“We have this word, belong. We use it to mean ‘being a part of.’ But the old English prefix be- has the semantic consequence of intensifying as it goes. So belonging means something closer to ‘the deepening of longing.’

That’s how you belong. Not by finally arriving, but by having the longing for arrival quickened, by being willing to long after life by living.”

That feels like a sweet way to seal today’s musings. I’m sending care and courage out to all.❤️

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