Feral and fenceless love: This is how we belong to each other
Waves crash, between the near shore covered in green growing things, and the rocky cliffs on the far side
What if our love for each other and this world could be feral and fenceless?
What if instead of confining categories like mine and not mine, us and other, we could live into the sense of us-all? How might our hearts and our possibilities grow, deepen, and flourish if we could offer our care freely?
What belonging could we find if we weaved ourselves and each other, wildly, back into the world?
We are shaped by so many forces that encourage us to close in and circle up. We’re taught to dole out love in carefully controlled doses. We categorize the humans and others around us into “mine” and “not mine.” “Mine” usually gets more of these titrated doses of care. My species, my beliefs, my country, my region, my state, my city, my neighborhood, my family, my home. Mine always collapsing us further in, away from anything other.
What if, instead, we looked to ‘other’ and “not mine” with big and curious compassion? What might be possible? What kind of expansion, what kind of above and belowground braiding together? What if our yearning to belong was met with a wild kind of love?
In my years of working with humans and their hurt, I have seen how desperately people want to belong. They (we) want to be tended, protected, cared for, and seen.
People can go to just about any lengths to feel they belong, to something and someone. They’ll devote their life to a partner or friends who cause them harm; hurt their own bodies and spirits for some inkling of connection; and they’ll harm others, if their group says those others are wrong or bad somehow. More often than not, these tenuous and cutting ties break, and they’re left alone once again.
I get to spend a lot of time with grieving people and scared people. (Basically: people.) Just about everyone I talk with lately is scared - for their family, their friends, the land and plants, the birds and creatures. Just about everyone I talk with is grieving - grieving beloveds who have died, grieving now-rocky relationships they’d thought solid and safe, grieving their cherished vision of the world to come.
It’s an honor and a gift to be with others in their fear and pain and grief, and to share mine with them. Just as the overculture has turned us away from the living world, and shoved our lives instead into handheld screens, it tells us, too, that there’s no time, no value in sitting with difficult emotions. Anything that’s hard or uncomfortable can be solved through more “productivity” and more consumption.
And so, it’s a revolutionary and radical act to turn instead to each other. To welcome in and embrace the grief and fear of another, or even our own. It’s a revolutionary act to sit quietly for a few moments with a tree in the forest or in the parking lot. It’s weird, it might be uncomfortable, there’s no script or set of operating procedures.
And it’s the only thing that will get us through. This is the way we belong to each other.
How strange (and frankly, awful) that it’s unusual and almost suspect to spend our time listening deeply to one another, and to the wind in the trees, to the frogs in the creek, to the owls calling through the woods.
Where do we find belonging, when we’ve been pushed out of the world?
Everyday we hear more and more of rampaging terrors. I see it in others and feel it in myself: we’re trying to tread water but it’s rising too fast, and so we pull in, shore up our defenses, and pile up sandbags to keep out the deluge to come.
I remember and forget and remember and forget: this is just what the forces of domination and violence want. They want us scared, and isolated. They want us to forget that we belong, always and forever, to each other and to the land.
Time and time again, they’ve stolen people away from one another. They’ve slashed and burned our lands, and our connection to the earth that gives us life. This cutting of connections is on purpose. To dominate, you terrorize, and make people forget that they have each other, and are held by each other. That we are held, every moment of our lives and in our dying and death by the sweet earth we came from and, someday, go right back to.
What I know is that we won’t let them. What I know is that the story they shove at us, one of violence and domination, is ultimately nothing next to the truth of us together.
Through vast time and across the world we have resisted. Likely each one of us alive today carries the dreams of ancestors who lived through their own deluge. I look to my Jewish ancestors who fled pogroms, my Irish ancestors who fled genocide through starvation.
If you listen, if you look back and forward and across time, across lines of mine/not mine, who is it that can teach you how to live, how to keep your heart turning toward the other?
Let’s remind each other, let’s teach each other that always and forever we need each other. This need for one another is our gift and our strength. We need each other like trees need our out-breath and we need theirs. We need each other like a full breast needs suckling. We need each other like flower needs bee.
We are each other’s always. They can’t make us forget this.
We remember, and in remembering, we belong, always, to one another.
