Creating the Webbd Wheel: Belonging
In which we find our people and our place, if we're lucky ...
One of the greatest drivers of our behavior is the search for connection and belonging. We all feel the need to know our roots, to find our place and people in the world. Our ideas about family have evolved over the decades, but belonging is not necessarily about family. We may feel gratitude and love for those who raised us and our childhood homes, but belonging is something different, something deeper and more primal, a recognition of spirit rather than a place in a family tree.
Many people go on quests to find their heritage, their ancestors, their roots. Some, like Morfran, do so in their youth. Others do it at the end of their lives, seeking peace and understanding.
Sometimes we can find answers about our people. Sometimes we can’t.
In my case, intuition has been a better guide than anything else. We’re all familiar with the wonderful feeling of engaging in an activity we feel born to do. Some of us are lucky enough to find a place we recognize, not with our minds, but with our souls.
When I left Colorado, where I was born and lived for five decades, and came to Maine, where I had never been, some part of me I had never known came home. I recognized this place, though I had never seen it. It spoke to me. It welcomed me in a way Colorado never had. I already knew I belonged near the water, but we live inland here, at least a couple of hours away from the sea. Still, there’s water everywhere, big water unlike any I knew in Colorado. I drive along the Kennebec River every day on my way to work. Water flows, day and night, through a culvert into the pond outside my window. Rain falls. The very air is saturated with water.
It was more than the water, though, that gave me such a strong feeling of recognition. It was the huge trees and thick growth, the granite and esker, the abundant waterfowl and wildlife, the spring nights vibrating with frog song. It was the very shape and structure of the old barns and houses, so unlike anything I’d known before.
During my first winter and spring here, I used to go out at night and lay my hands on the bark of the huge old maples along the driveway, looking up at the sky, thick with stars out here away from city lights, breathing in the icy humid air. I felt uprooted and insecure, so far away from everything I’d ever known, truly a stranger in a strange land. But when I leaned my forehead against the maple trees (I’d never seen one before in real life), I felt as though they recognized me. They were glad I was here.
I felt some undiscovered part of me belonged, and that feeling has never left me.
To be loved, to have someone put their arms around us and welcome us home, to feel our roots in exactly the right kind of soil, to be recognized as kith and kin and a member of the tribe, are needs we all carry, though some never get them met.
I am so lucky.
Many of my characters are in search of connection, or reconnection. Family is messy. Family is complicated. We cannot escape our blood ties and genetics, however much we might want to. No one can hurt us as much as family can, and no one can cherish us as much, either. No one is a better mirror for us than our family; our people reflect back to us our beliefs and values, our physical characteristics, our talents and weaknesses, and our patterns of behavior.
Morfran, in seeking to come to terms with his sister’s death and find justice for her, leaves the loving circle of his adopted family and finds his blood grandfather, who opens a new world to him, a world he never knew existed, filled with people and creatures he’d never heard of.
He, like me, discovers he was much more than he ever knew.
(Published with post #19 of The Hanged Man.)