Coming Home
A Bird’s Eye View of Home
Lake Chelan and the North Cascades from the air above the Yakima Valley.
I pressed my face to the tiny airplane window in the last twenty minutes of a flight from Kansas City to Seattle. We were just to the east of the Cascade crest, and my seat on the right side of the plane looked north. Lake Chelan shimmered below me, surrounded by the snow capped mountains of the North Cascades.
I spent last week at a camp facility outside of Kansas City holding space with four other volunteers like myself, four clinical providers, and a roster of visiting specialists for a cohort of five, brave and beautiful women who were there to face their post traumatic stress. We began each morning with yoga and ended each day with meditation. In the twelve, thirteen, fourteen hours that stretched between those two practices, we heard each others’ stories, participated in ritual, trust exercises, and equine therapy, and were taught by clinical providers about trauma and the brain, emotional regulation, social styles, and interpersonal dynamics in our families and other primary relationships.
As the plane banked south for SeaTac, I could see the furry hump of Bainbridge Island rising out of the Salish Sea. The Olympic Mountains stood stalwart beyond it, and a ferry struck out from the downtown ferry terminal, making its way to the island’s terminal at Eagle Harbor. Home. I would be on that very ferry, heading on its next trip to Eagle Harbor, in another hour and a half. It had been a bright, warm day, but as the sun began to set a haze gathered in the sky lending a magical cast to the already enchanting scene that stretched below me.
The Salish Sea, Bainbridge Island, and the Olympic Mountains from the final descent into SeaTac.
Relief gathered in my tired limbs and coursed through my aching muscles. I was ready to breathe the damp air, surrounded again by green. I was ready to sleep in my own bed, to feel held in place. I was ready to move freely throughout my days, sit less, wander through the woods at will. I considered my life, my home, with astonishment and a fresh quality of gratitude gifted by my nine days away.
It was dark by the time my ferry detached from the Seattle dock, heading west. I sat in the foremost nook on the boat, looking out to where the ferry’s lights made the water visible in glints and glimmers.
Place Attachment and Belonging
“Belonging includes feelings of having roots in a place,” write Environmental Psychology authors Leila Scannell and Robert Gifford. Belonging tops the list of psychological benefits of place attachment–the emotionally based bond we build with the places we love.
“The need to belong appears to be one of the fundamental psychological needs, and ties to place can help us satisfy it,” write Scannell and Gifford. But how? What do I have to learn from the land? What was I feeling for when I returned home? How do I sense my belongingness to place?
I considered my roots in this place in my time away. I wondered what I was missing in this dynamic span of the year. I imagined the week like a flipbook; the image collected from one day to the next wouldn’t change all that much, the minutiae perhaps impossible to detect. But I knew that after being away for nine days the differences would be apparent.
Huckleberries, just days out from bloom.
I set out first thing Sunday morning to log the changes that occurred in the woods and around my neighborhood in my absence. The hazelnut and alder trees are dripping with catkins, the former golden, the latter rust. Catkins release pollen on the wind ahead of blooms, ahead of leaves. In the case of the hazelnut, the pollen remains inert for the time in which it takes the tree to bloom. Then, in mysterious syncopation, it comes to life to fertilize the fuchsia blooms that will go on to become pairs and clusters of nuts.
Just before I left, a friend alerted me to the blooming Indian plum, but in the microclimate that is my neighborhood, they hadn’t yet emerged. Upon my return they were the first plant I sought out and sure enough, cascades of snow white flowers decorated their branch tips.
The currant in our garden has put out leaves. My neighbor’s plant, exposed to more sun than mine, has just begun to bloom in vivid pink. The evergreen huckleberries are covered in fists of blooms. One more day of warm sun and they will flower, and with their bloom the drone of bees will fill the air again.
The crabapples on the seashore are covered in white flowers. The frogs have emerged from the muddy depths to fill the night air with song. The grasses have put up their first green shoots. The daffodils and hellebore and daphne have come to life.
In Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home, Toko-pa Turner writes, “To belong to a place is to be embedded in it. Its struggles are your contentions, its harvest your wealth, its needs your purpose…There is no separation from the place where we live, except for the one made by our own forgetting.”
Hazelnut catkins, the fuchsia blooms they will pollinate are just beginning to emerge.
I consider Turner’s words, this place’s needs are my purpose. I feel this deeply. Here, in these final weeks of winter, I feel an urgency to tend to the needs of place, specifically to uproot that which doesn’t serve the health of the land I love. To tend the space of belonging for the beneficial plants and everything that depends on them, all that works together for good in this place that holds me so well.
The Work of Belonging
What does it mean to belong? This theme has followed me through life, through a year of writing, through last week’s challenges, both those in which I was interpersonally involved and in the dramas of the lives that played out around me.
One recurring theme was the insistence that belonging was something we bestowed on or withheld from each other. In my own struggles I’ve learned that belonging is not anyone’s to give, only mine to claim. Claiming my own belonging is perhaps one of the biggest gifts I can give others, releasing them from the overwhelming burden of meeting emotional needs that were never theirs to meet. “There is no separation,” to borrow Turner’s words again, “except for the one made by our own forgetting.”
The first of the blooming trees have flowered along the seashore.
“Bring your own belonging,” I want to bark at those who place this burden on me. But, to extend the metaphor of belonging to place to belonging writ large, what are my obligations? Belonging is not mine to grant or withhold, but how do I tend to it? By cultivating safe spaces for growth, by uprooting all that doesn’t serve. Here, too, I have some work to do.
And so, while the sun is shining and the ground is supple, I set to work, happily pulling and disentangling myself from all that would choke out these tender spaces of belonging. The work never ends, but neither do the returns on the investments made.
