On Birds and Belonging
Community has been on my mind since the pandemic. I’m sure it’s there for most of us, floating like a ghost in the Anthropocene. For me, longing for community comes in like a shiver of instinct. A subtle remembering. Something like, is this all there is? And then it’s gone.
The grief and loss that we attribute to a failure in our personality is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should be found.
- Paul Shepherd
There’s an interesting trend happening among my millennial counterparts. It seems like we can’t have one conversation without someone saying:
Let’s buy land
I wanna raise some chickens.
What about goats?
I deleted my social media.
For me it often sounds like: my life is feeling a little too sterile these days.
I’m not surprised by this. After all community is embedded into our bones, it’s an evolutionary advantage. It sings safety and belonging. And if we look to cultures who are still living connected to land and place, community living is woven into the fabric of daily life. It’s easy to romanticize indigenous ways of knowing, and so I don’t wish to do that here. Instead I aim to highlight something that has been lost to modernity, and lean into the nebulous feeling of loss or longing as I know it in my own body. It’s more like, what is the ontology of longing for place-based relationships? Where did it go?
As I searched for some useful definitions, I found an ecological framework for community felt true. It’s something like this: a group of interdependent organisms of different species growing or living together in a specified habitat. In this categorization, there is a sense of co-regulation, like the organisms exist and grow both because of and with the other species. Each life form benefits from and supports the growing network of relationships. Mycelium manifest. This is what I long for. In her book, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home Toko-Pa Turner says,
Most of us think of belonging as a mythical place, that if we keep diligently searching for, we might eventually find. But what if belonging isn’t a place at all, but a skill: a set of competencies that we, in modern life, have lost or forgotten?
Like the living bridge, these competencies are the ways in which we can coax, weave, and tend to the roots of our separation—and in so doing, restore our membership in belonging.
The idea that belonging is a skill, a verb, lights a fire in the woodstove of my soul. She is saying that this thing we are craving is an action, and therefore, profoundly available for us to cultivate. It just takes practice, desire, the possibility of getting it wrong, and trying again. I see tremendous hope in this. We are not shunned from the house of community, we have simply lost the set of skills required to re-associate to what is already ours. And like with most things worth doing, creating a practice is a necessary first step before growth and change can occur.
My office sits across from one of our local outreach centres. There are usually several unhoused folks gathered around our entrance. What strikes me is the unanimous community-oriented nature of people when not obfuscated by social constructs. Rarely, someone without a home is alone. It happens, yet more often, at least in my area, our street entrenched neighbours exist shoulder-to-shoulder. Lately, I’ve considered the idea that unhoused humans are a social and economic pulse. They hold the projections of our collective shadow: our discomfort, fear, and audacious pain. Like a radar no-one asked for. How fitting that we do everything to look away, such is the nature of the shadow. So instead of turning the other cheek, I want to move towards and in. What if they are offering to us a mirror of our humanity? Such that, when on the margins and outside social confines, we gather, we live in groups, we create community.
It could be said that this is a matter of survival for unhoused folks, however isn’t it always a matter of survival? Research on loneliness is showing that it is deeply connected to increased mortality and morbidity in adult populations. Loneliness kills and good relationships are protective. The fact that those of us privileged enough to have homes stay separate seems to be more of a flaw of contemporary culture than human nature. Somewhere along the timeline we bought into the idea that there was something to gain by being separate. And if we look to those who’s very existence challenges our ideas of what is normal or “good”, a crack emerges in the veneer.
The threads I’m weaving here may seem like they come from distant corners. However, if we stay with interconnectivity: community; folks on the margins; and belonging exist in a cosmic braid. The industrial complex is predicated on the myth of separation and otherness. Stay disconnected, keep the wheel turning through the various distractions and avoidance mechanisms necessary to exist under this order. Stay away from soul. And so if we want to challenge this, what better rebellion than to come home to belonging and community. And, perhaps we look to the humans who we so often disregard for guidance. Watch how togetherness is an action. Sit together with no agenda other than being. Chitchat on a sidewalk. Don’t shy away from what our culture regards as messy, unclean. For if you do, the lessons may come looking for you in the shape of loneliness.
In my psychotherapy practice, I reckon with disconnection as the great tragedy of our time. It is physically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually harmful. This in itself is another newsletter, or perhaps a multi-part series.
Right now, at the coffee shop, a finch who will remain unnamed until my ornithology skills develop, hops over to peck at crumbs near my foot and I’m drawn back to the ecology of community. The muffin feeds the human, who feeds the bird, and for a moment through relationship to the bird, the human senses connection to the wild and remembers we are all of this land and place. Perhaps the human will then go out into the world and smile at a stranger or start a conversation. And in this way, begins to wake up to community as instinct, as answer, as verb.
If you agree, disagree, or discovered something about yourself through reading, I’d love to hear from you.