Belonging

This may seem an odd point of contemplation for the knee-jerk nonconformist that I am, but I've been thinking lately about the urge to belong, and the search for a place to make a Torah-shaped space. Up until two months ago, I never thought about this, although if I had I would have said that I was never very good at fitting in and never much wanted to (chicken or egg?). Almost 11 years as a military wife has certainly cemented that opinion: once you're digested by the guts of this machine, you discover pretty quickly that you're either a joiner or a loner. While I've made friends with other military wives (I hope you're reading this, and I hope you know how much I've valued your friendship), it's almost always been with other loners. Joiners almost always get caught up in the farce known as "wearing your husband's rank." In a nutshell, WE aren't the ones in the military, and WE don't have a rank. WE'RE supposed to all be equal; it's only our husbands who have to know to a hair's-breadth who outranks whom, who salutes first. As we all know, it doesn't really work that way --- generals' wives have personal secretaries, chair committees, and host teas to which corporals' wives don't get invited. Lt. Col.s' wives are certainly aware that the impressions they make and the networks they develop will have a slightly-greater-than-butterfly-effect on their husbands' chances of promotion. You can't take a tae-bo class at the base gym, or join the PTA (in some places, even the KIDS wear rank), or even go to Sunday brunch at the officers' club without tripping over all of the joiners grooming and nipping at each other. It's worse in some places than others, and I remember Quantico as being the most rotten with rank. When my husband was made Warrant Officer, I was summoned to a coffee at the base general's house and made to tour the residence while a volunteer personal secretary/docent delivered herself of a stream of absolutely numbing detail on the not-particularly-unusual antecedents of every duvet cover and china ornament in the place, following which the general's wife (a former elementary school teacher) gave a sitting room lesson on how to behave now that we were officers' wives. I tried to ask pertinent questions about exactly when one begins to hand-over-heart salute a moving flag when one is stationery, and the appropriate time to leave one's calling card in the cleverly disguised calling-card holders that certainly weren't ashtrays scattered throughout her house (and one can only assume the homes of all flag officers). But I was also thinking some things that no longer fit in with my philosophical goals of right thought and right speech, but which in outline went something like .... nope, can't work even the outline into good Buddhist practice.


Good-bye

So after almost four decades of adamantly not fitting in, I was sandbagged by Kansas City. No one who hasn't lived there would believe it, but Kansas City is seething with nonconformists. From the moment I went to a friend's potluck dinner and realized that almost everybody there had renamed themselves --- T'gallen, Phoenix, Astral ... only Wolfgang still had the name his mother gave him --- I realized that finally I had found the place where nonconformists, in the process of backing as far away from the groom and snarl crowd as possible, had simultaneously backed into one another. And once you've met one, it's like dominoes falling and you've met a dozen. T'ger gave me comp tickets to hang out at the KC Renaissance Festival, where I first encountered and fell deeply in love with the djembe. Ed gave me a djembe and told me to go to Sacred Earth Arts to learn how to play it. The woman who owns Sacred Earth Arts introduced me to the sisters who help organize the Gaea Goddess Gathering, and invited me to the benefit where I met the editor of "Redfruit" ; before long I was learning to drum with Women of the Drum, and that led to the war protest rallies that I know they're still having every week at the J.C. Nichols park with the horse fountain, and to playing to support Take Back the Night and the Quaker Friends peace benefits, and before you knew it we were all drumming around a fire with some groovy, semi-naked heathens at the Heartland Pagan Festival. I bought books and traded books with The Right Duke at Prospero's Book Store, and got overflowing boxes of organic produce from Local Harvest, which Gambit helped me load into my liberally (in both senses) bumper-stickered car. Our son found a Sebastian-shaped place at City in Motion dance studio. I've never been anywhere with so many artists, dancers, and musicians all feeding one another creative energy. And I thought that we would stay. We were supposed to stay --- Ed was supposed to be able to extend his tour there until he retired, so we bought a house, and for the first time maybe ever, I made a space for myself that was bigger than my corner of the couch with a book. This was my home. These were my friends. This was my place.


What's Your Favorite Place?

Sebastian, our son, is seven years old and going through that time where you're becoming aware of your parents as individuals in a world full of people, and you become obsessed with discovering all of the details about them that make them unique. What's your shoe size? What do you do at work? What was your favorite toy when you were a kid? What was your most embarassing moment? (We decline to answer that one.) What's your favorite place? Ed and I field the barrage as well as we're able, so when Sebastian asked me a few days ago about my favorite place, I answered, "My favorite place is where my family is." Given our peripatetic lifestyle, this is not only the best answer but also the right answer. Even before I married the military and started moving every three years, I don't remember having lived in the same place for more than five years (and, I think, that was from ages 5 to 10). So from the beginning, I've been a hoarder of symbolic objects, a saver of special rocks and ribbons used for the funerals of pets and gifts from 4th grade boyfriends and pieces of rough art crafted by the friends I most hated to leave. After all of these years, my collections are more presentable: Ed and I picked up river rocks from places we lived or visited the first several years we were married, and I made a fountain with them. We have a LOT of original art from people we know. We save clothes and jewelry and photographs from four continents' worth of travel. But I know what I'm really doing --- I'm hoarding a cigar box full of totemic objects, things that will have to stand in for the people and places I've had to leave. My box has just gotten bigger. My sense of home has never been fixed on a place --- imagine my wild envy of my best friend, who grew up in a home that has been in her family for generations, who had her wedding on its lawn, and can bring her daughter there to see where her family has lived, longer than the past century. I'm a snail, a hermit crab, and because I have to carry every memory's object, I also have to cull, ruthlessly, every three years. The baby swing that rocked all of my children to sleep has gone to Major Thrift, and I cried as I set it out. Prospero's got all of the books that everyone outgrew; I gave away the club dresses of my 20s, still faintly perfumed with memories, the wool suits that my grandmother made for me 20 years ago, the crib that my stepsister's children slept in before my children did, the sectional sofa that I got from a friend in Jordan ten years ago, that drove me to distraction because my children loved to make ramps and towers and tents with the seat cushions. But this endless distillation of meaning into fewer and fewer objects only brings into the harsh light what I already knew was true. Home is not, after all, the place to which you are accustomed, no matter how well you know its random noises and odd corners, no matter how long you've had to feel as if familiarity means possession. I must remember, whenever I begin to grieve for places lost, that my home has always been wherever the immensely precious, fragile, obliviously bonky heads of my children rest, dreaming, before another contentious, busy day, wherever my best friend, my husband surrenders his watch over us all to sleep (where he and whoever happens to be The Baby usually end up snoring in bass-and-soprano tandem). We possess nothing. Everything can, and sometimes must be, left behind; where you really belong is never determined by an inventory of items, but by the presence of those to whom you, yourself, are indispensible.

Wisdom comes from seeing your Self clearly.
Compassion comes from seeing your Self in others.

---- posted on Meditation Circle at tribe.net