Image description: Midsummer woods in Eastern Pennsylvania with cut-outs of characters by Pamela Colman Smith from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. From left to right they are Ace of Swords, Eight of Cups and Four of Wands.
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Something I used to wish my therapist would have told me before I got deep into my own therapeutic work was that when you start poking around to see how things are in your life and why, that’s a direct bid for trouble.
It’s a bit like the theme in old stories where a person is forbidden to look at or inside something but then does and is punished. There are things you won’t be able to put back in that box once they’re out, no matter how much havoc it’s causing or how scary it is.
I think it’s common to regret seeing the truth once you’ve seen it. To wish you could herd all the terrors you’d summoned straight back in the container they came from, seek safety.
Ultimately, though—but also weirdly and fortunately—since there’s little else to be sure of in times like those, a new sort of safety starts to cluster and crystallize. And it forms in an unlikely place: the repeated realization that no matter how much you might believe that you want to, you cannot go back.
It’s counterintuitive but real, the way bitterness sometimes gives way to comfort. What the entire body wants to reject at first can be priming the body to take and digest a new food. And it might be the start of a much needed change.
In my experience, there are a few things you can expect when you start to see things you hadn’t seen before—in your relationship, family, community, culture.
How it tends to go for me is that there’s an immediate and often acute emotional response; a fire that drives a reaction which often involves the need to name what’s been realized aloud. I’ve always been one to want witness, but others deal differently.
As intense emotions do, that piercing gives way usually sooner than later. And that’s when a far less comfortable feeling might make its appearance: the overwhelm of realizing this isn’t going to change overnight. Or at all, even. And overwhelm is good friends with panic. I see them everywhere together.
Change starts its unfurling the millisecond something that was once hidden is revealed. Cupid is gone, flown off in a rage. And what that means is that whatever control over the process you might have thought yourself to have, that’s canceled. And it’s too late to go back. And what is the terror of it being too late to go back, if not a phobia of grief?
I’m absolutely afraid of grief. And at that point, for me—when that overwhelm kicks in, coupled with the fear that things will be different now and I won’t know how til I’m neck deep in it—that’s when you might see someone like me running, hauling my things toward an orange sky.
I’ve always been one for ritual. And from the time I was old enough to leave home until recently, I’ve repeated a very specific ritual act in the times when I’ve seen something too big to accept that felt too great to reckon with: I’d take stock, pare down, pack, tape, lift, haul and go. Temporarily settle somewhere until the time came to do it again.
Some rituals are colored more with tones of away than toward and that’s one of them. I don’t say it with judgment. The urge to run—both the giving in to and riding it—has been a critical part of my learning process. Still, I know there’s a seeking in it, too. And that seeking, for me, has to do with belonging.
A couple years ago—several months in to an impulse move to California that I regretted—I came across a story in Meditations on the Tarot that went like this:
Four brothers set out in pursuit of treasure and after a few days, they come across a pile of iron. The first brother says “this is it!” The others don’t agree, but he stops there, makes a decent life for himself, and they walk on.
Weeks pass and the three stumble upon a pile of copper, where the second brother says “oh, this is definitely it!” And while the other two are skeptical that this could be the treasure they’ve sought, he stops and sets up a life. The others wish him the best, and walk on.
Months go by this time, and the remaining two brothers come upon a pile of silver. The third brother is positive this is it, and so he stops there. And the last brother walks on, alone.
Years and years go by. The last brother walks alone a very long time. When he can’t walk another step he scans the ground for a shady spot to rest. And in that moment he sees that the land he’s standing on is gilded, sand speckled with gold as far as even the nearby eagle could see (1980).
I wrote a quick reflection on the story at that time which said that “with life experience…we learn the distinctions between relationships that sustain and vivify from the kinds that detract from and repress.
We learn to walk on by when we stumble on heaps of iron, copper and even silver, knowing in our bones and blood that there is gold. We learn to hold out for what we need and perhaps what’s more, we learn to trust that what we need is available.”
I was thinking about certain kinds of interpersonal relationships—namely romantic partners and friends—because that’s what I was reckoning with at the time when I first read the story. It’s a good tale if you are also someone who’s walked ten years alone, or left behind everyone you once called kin in hopes to find new ways of relating. Ways you’ve not yet experienced but are willing to bet the old ways, do exist.
I’ve been going through a lot of changes and have gone back to a lot of the stories I read during that time to see what new meanings would reveal themselves now. I find that stories, like Tarot cards, shape shift as we do.
In Tarot, the pentacles suit is often interpreted as being to do with career and finance which I’ve seen as being more deeply to do with security and belonging. Today I think that the gold in the story is a symbol of belonging itself; of being included, and of feeling that we are where we’re meant to be.
For people who’ve lived long lives at odds with their environments, I suspect that this visual of walking a decade alone before one might ever experience belonging could be comforting, if not resonant. I think, as I often do, of Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ advice not to “pack whatever is easiest or most available into the emptiness,” but instead, “hold out for the right medicine” (1996).
But I’ve found few maps for those on the holding out path. And believe me, I’ve looked.
I’ve just finished reading Ignacio Martín-Baró’s collection of essays, Writings for a Liberation Psychology. There’s an essay in it titled “The people: Toward a definition,” in which Martín-Baró attempts to define the often-used term “the people.”
To me, it is a piece on belonging, which is affirmed through a paraphrased quote at the end attributed to revolutionary Che Guevara, which says that “one does not belong to the people of one’s birth, but rather to the people for whom one struggles and dies” (1996).
And it might sound dramatic to imagine needing to die for someone in order to experience belonging, but it raises questions that I think are important:
Whose well-being do you see as inextricably tied in with your own?
And as you shore up your boundaries and learn to say no and accept your own limits, who—if anyone—do you keep your willingness to be inconvenienced for, to fight on behalf of?
Martín-Baró writes, “The people is a denunciation of today’s lack of solidarity, and the annunciation of tomorrow’s community…a concept that points to the question of being in terms of having. The people are those whose reality is founded not on what they have but rather on who they are” (1996).
How many of us seek out our belonging in things? In piles of copper, or silver one can separate and take from the ground?
And when was it that we started to call personal items belongings? What did that tell us about our selves?
The essay brought up a lot for me. Being white, middle class, able-bodied and cis, I wanted to write about it because it moved me so much, but feared it could never be for me.
While working on this Offering, I dreamt of awkwardness and un-belonging; feelings handed down through my paternal line from women afraid to leave the house; cursed, perhaps, by winds that blow only two thousand miles off the coast of Sardinia.
I dreamt there were mirrors. And my body could move, by miracle, in the ways that I wanted. Then someone I looked up to looked at me as if I’d just rode in from Mars. And as everything in me lurched to explain, my spirit felt the blow and shrunk back.
With all due respect to dreams these were real feelings. I fear all the time that the people is not something I will or can ever belong to. That the ideas in this essay by a psychologist I look up to are not for me to see myself in, and certainly not mine to share.
But I’m risking the possibility that that may be true, because there are few pieces of writing I’ve encountered that offer a more clear directive for this lifelong quest to belong. And my hope is that, if belonging is something that you also seek, maybe these words will aid you too.
Martín-Baró describes the people as more of a process than an entity. The people is a search and an effort, like the brothers questing for valuables. And it is a journey toward a very specific treasure: “a concrete community of free people.” The people is, for Martín-Baró, “a dynamic demand…a vocation—a calling” (1996).
Just like the story of the searching brothers—and many old stories for that matter—“the people” is future-oriented. It involves a rejection of the present in favor of a future that is still a mystery. It says “no” to the iron, copper and silver and insists on holding out for the gold.
“The people,” for Martín-Baró is “an opening against all closure, flexibility against everything fixed, elasticity against all rigidity, a readiness to act against all stagnation.” It is “hunger for change…those who accept the other and seek to become other…those who are open to the other…those who look for and struggle for the other” (1996).
And importantly, the people is not only about the other. It also implies “an opening for personal growth” because when one belongs to the people, “the self is open to becoming different…” (1996). For Martín-Baró, “the people” is a calling. It is an openness to change, to integrating new information, and to becoming different than one once was.
So by this logic, that person who can only run when new information is introduced, is not and cannot be the people. And I don’t know about you but for me, that’s a tough pill to swallow.
The brother in the story who eventually finds gold leaves his blood brothers behind in favor of something that will have enduring value. Had he been unwilling to relinquish allegiance to those relationships—which could represent anything we inherit; rituals, blood relations, worldviews, identities that don’t align with who we are—he would not have found what he sought, and what was needed.
There are so many things in life that promise belonging and ultimately come up short. Pretend to have nourishment, but don’t. Present a promise of security that turns out to be flimsy in the trenches.
And how many of us have stopped short of walking toward the worlds we know are possible in favor of the comfort afforded in false belonging. How open are we to loosening our grip on faux closure, to being fluid in the face of hardness, and to act when it’s easier to stay stuck?
Whether you’re thinking in terms of the personal, political, or both, you might recognize this reality, as I have, that there is belonging among others who’ve been willing to change when everything told them to settle and stay the same. There are things unique to that experience, and lots of ways to find solidarity in them, lonely as it still often is.
My wish for anyone reading this is that you are able to strike that livable balance that to me is a gilded beach: the acceptance of being abandoned by the siblings who need to believe iron is gold, and the hope that a deeper belonging is available if you walk in what you know to be true.
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To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.
As always, thank you so much for being here. <3
Sources
Anonymous. (1980). Meditations on the Tarot: A journey into Christian Hermeticism. TarcherPerigee.
Estés, C. P. (1996). Women who run with the wolves: Myths and stories of the wild woman archetype. Ballantine Books.
Martín-Baró, I. (1996). Writings for a liberation psychology. Harvard University Press.
Jessica, this one touched me deeply. I've been processing how my blood family and even how some of my friends do not share my values and how a lot of the time we just don't get along or don't have much to talk about. I've been dealing with the loneliness of that, and doing my best to hold out and keep searching for that community of free people. Thank you so much for this. Your words are so resonate and are working on me like a healing balm. I feel seen <3
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.