A Step Not Yet Fully Taken
On Belonging & Becoming
This post published September 2023 was renewed May 2024 to allow full access.
Dear Friends and Family,
Welcome to you who are new! I’m delighted you’re here.
I send this letter from Columbia Icefields in Jasper National Park, Canada—Banff’s lesser known but dare I wonder more spectacular sister. I drove east by way of Prince George, BC, stopping nights at glacier lakes, driving past the occasional straw-colored field recently cut to bales of hay and towering mountain ranges slathered with mustard-colored Cottonwoods and Aspens, autumn here at its peak now. And then Mount Robson appeared, terraced in ages of ice and fresh coats of snow, lofty evergreens in the foreground mirroring draping folds of time. I could have lingered with this face in front of my own forever. I wonder how I can return to life so far from the wild, so far from the uncertainty of not knowing where I’ll be at day’s end, where this road will take me, and what’s around the bend.
Even so, the vacationers are going home now, winter up ahead, and the wandering full-timers are migrating south. I’m eastbound across Canada before making that southward turn. I feel these northern roads emptying. For the first time in nearly eleven months on this journey, I was besieged Wednesday night with the lonely awareness that there was no human for what seemed like hours distance.
Gratitude.
I’m grateful to share moments in your day each week. If I could put each letter in a paper envelope and have it arrive in the mail slot of your front door, I would. And I would imagine you opening it, deciphering my lettering scrawled across the page. This is the image I have when writing to you—letters back home, across the world, Beyond the Comfort Zone now read by you across eighty-one countries. I’m still trying to find words for what this means. The best I have is that together, as one humanity, we’re drawn to—refusing to shy away from—the questions that whisper in the night about this life we live as bodies with one another on this planet we call home.
Forthcoming.
In the days ahead, I will move little and read and write a lot. I am giving a paper on Thursday (by Zoom) at the Annual International Jean Gebser Society Conference. If you have been here for a while, you know from footnotes that Gebser’s vision of the human inspires much of my contemplation. In this paper, I speculate from what I call a “philosophical physiology” on the widening epidemic of diseases of the immune system, namely cancer and autoimmune diseases. I suggest these are collective pleas—signaled through individuals’ sensitive perceptivity—for the unfolding of a next stage of human becoming. It’s tough territory, but I am convinced it is important to take speculative steps in this direction to begin to loosen the grip of a strictly biomedical perspective on disease.
I will not post this conference paper publicly for future publication purposes, but if you wish to know more, leave me a note in comments, and we’ll take it from there.
A Step Not Yet Fully Taken
LaSalle Lake, BC. I wish I could give you the silence of this body of water minutes before an autumn sunset. I wish I could show you the stillness of this air, the absence of any movement anywhere. We could have a seat in the tall grassy reeds at the water’s edge, and the afternoon air would receive the hushed breath of the bodies called you and me, and the bodies called you and me would receive this air effortlessly, and together we would gasp just a little when the wood-brown Grebe we did not see perched motionless there on the yonder edge takes sudden flight, webbed feet and wingtips waltzing across water, giving birth to sound, drawing ripples center to shore, and the still image we happened into when we took our seat would have just shown us what it is to come alive.
We [would] recover our awareness.1 And together, we would now belong to the air and the Grebe and lake and motionless trees, to the reeds and clouds and slant light folding through, and to one another and all that is, seen and unseen. The moment would pass as all moments do, and what would we have to claim but aliveness itself?
To be alive is to body forth the creative energies of the universe. . . . There is no separate body divided from the whole; there is only the coming into being of the multiplicity of bodies as the unfolding expressiveness of all that is.2
If this is so, what are we to make of the inclination to mine—which we have been exploring this month as both possessing and hollowing out, of staking claim on something or someone and emptying it of its promise, its sovereignty, its verition, which is to say, its moment-by-moment truth. When, two weeks ago, I invited you to wonder with me about mine, you did, and a theme emerged from your own words (in comments). This theme turned the question of mine to belonging.
What is one to the other—mine to belonging and belonging to mine? And why does it matter?
What we are up to here is what we call a hermeneutic spiral, which is to say, a winding, turning up and down, within and through a question, interpreting at every turn toward finer understanding, recognizing that we’ll never land on a solid answer. We’ll never close ourselves in. Rather, we open and open more the question, and as we do, we make way for the promise of new ways of being.
belong bəˈlôNG || v. be + longen (Old Eng.) “to go,” derived from the Latin longus: long, extended; of a long duration.
Might we say that to belong is to go the long duration together?
belonging(s) n. of the verb belong.
With this, belongings are not so much mine possessions to have and to hold but those treasures that have meaning by the duration of our lives that they have accompanied us. By such duration, might they not abide evermore in our care? If so, how could we ever hollow them out, empty them of their moment-by-moment truth?
Could we say that belonging is a field? And in that field, there is movement, two poles receiving and giving, giving and receiving?
If this __________ belongs to me, can we not say that I belong to this __________?
Can we agree that we belong to the Earth on which we walk and one another and every creature alongside whom we live? You might say, yes, but that means these belong to me, too. On this, we would not disagree. But we’ve changed our orientation, you see.
Belonging is two-way. Mine-ing is not. Mine-ing stakes hold, hovers over, hollows out. Belonging can not do that, or we would not be long together. We would not go the long duration—none of us. There is in belonging the intrinsic need for one another and all life here on this great blue planet.
We’re moving mine as possession out of the picture and slipping into a field of participation—of abiding together for a long duration, intimating care not exploitation, not annihilation, which happens when we hollow out the Earth or one another . . . because we want something!
We discover the Earth in the depths of our being through participation, not through isolation or exploitation. We are most ourselves when we are most intimate with the rivers and mountains and woodlands, with the sun and the moon and the stars in the heavens; when we are most intimate with the air we breathe, the Earth that supports us, the soil that grows our food, with the meadows in bloom. We belong here. Our home is here. The excitement and fulfillment of our lives is here.3
So, how did modern human forget that we belong and are belonged to? That we’re walking through the field of mutual belonging; that we’re breathing for a while on a spiraling sphere that belongs not to you or me but to itself and the life it breathes into us—our homes erected on living Earth; the cars we drive pumped with eons of carbon once packed in the loins of this, our endlessly alive home; tomorrow’s cup of coffee the alchemy of Earth and Sky and Water and the single-celled ones and fire and human hands.
Plenty say it was the shift to farming that foisted us into the belief that there’s not enough, that there are only so many pieces of the pie.4 Better belly up and stake your claim, lest the pie of land runs out. But there is evidence to suggest otherwise, that some hunters and gatherers warred for territory, too, and whatever “gold” they thought was mine. And we see it in animals. So, we would split hairs if we tried to pin the reason we forgot on something we cannot ever pinpoint.
Which gives us reason to toss something radical into the fold, see where it takes us in a what if sort of way. What if how we got here is not so much about a fall but a step not yet fully taken? And suppose that we ourselves extend that longer stride . . . from the inside?
Do we know our own inside? The real truth of it? Not what or how we’re told to be or what or how we think we want to be, but the inner belonging to life that yearns to be.
Forget the roles we play, the face we show, the boxes we put ourselves in. What is that whisper in your ear that no one else can hear? It’s telling you and it’s telling me how to belong to our life. And how we belong to our life is how we belong to the whole.
I leave you with these questions. If you’re so inclined when the spirit moves you, return to the discussion thread in comments and share what of this hermeneutic spiral lives inside you these next days. Your reflections with me and one another now are creating something. Get to know one another here. It strikes me that I shouldn’t be the only one so inspired by what you have to say!
Ever in gratitude and with love,
Renée
P.S. I took a selfie, my first, with a nod to for the gentle nudge wondering if I place myself from time to time in images of the surround. No. But I did here, coming out of the woods Thursday morning after that long night lonely for other humans.
Peggy Whalen-Levitt, “Liturgy to Dawn and Dusk: A Co-Creation of the Inner Life of the Child in Nature: Presence and Practice Cohort, 2012–2014,” in The Place of Our Belonging: A Work for Children and Educators Mentored by Thomas Berry, ed. Peggy Whalen-Levitt (Greensboro, NC: The Center for Education, Imagination and the Natural World, 2023), p. 104.
Renée Eli, “Toward a Science that Re-enchants and Shepherds,” Place of Our Belonging, p. 177.
Thomas Berry, in Peggy Whalen-Levitt, “Part III: Birthing a Practice: Introduction,” in Place of Our Belonging, (c.f. Thomas Berry, The Sacred Universe: Earth, Spirit, and Religion in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009, p. 95), p. 181.
There are countless sources to support this thesis, but anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson offers a good start, a brilliantly cohesive narration of this unfolding in Peripheral Visions: Learning Along the Way (New York: HarperCollins, 1994). Of course, pinning a shift so profound on one ‘event’ is oversimplification human hubris writ large. It is important to see the human as an unfolding, significant stages of the unfolding informing each next stage, not in a linear way but as an intensification that eventually breaks down for a next stage to break through (Gebser, Ever-Present Origin). Where we are today is an unfolding of what we cannot yet see informed by what we cannot remember but live all the same. The significance of today is that awareness is aware enough that the unfolding need not be accident, that we can participate in human becoming—through inner work. This is the Great Work of our time (Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future).
It is true that we will never decide upon the 'reason' we turned away, why some folks decided that decimating those that live with the land, and in their bodies, was the right way to go. It is so hard to know why they would think that was a good idea?
So here we are.
There is a soft, slow groundswell of change coming. People nudging us to look inside, to widen our perspective, and, accept there may be a different way to do this. These people, like you Renee and so many others, give me hope.
The next stride comes from the inside and some people are scared of what lies in there, or perhaps more than fear they simply do not know, they have never been taught to look. We are on the precipice of getting 'sorted out' (OK, that's a bad term but it's what popped into my head). By sorted I mean moving into a better equilibrium both inside and out. But to reach the other side we all have work to do. That effort begins with noticing, softening, and allowing for a different path.
Thank you for the work that you do Sweetie, you are truly changing the world one article or presentation at a time and we appreciate it.
Hello my brilliant, soulful friend. Your reflection on belonging and becoming in word and image has stilled me into a deepening presence. Thoughts, sensations, emotions arise….then settle. What lingers is the experience of being bodied on body. All of us belonging to the earth, herself turning in a hermeneutic spiral of becoming. All of us participating knowingly or unknowingly in the breaking through(mining) of what Gebser refers to as integral consciousness.