Yes

– William Stafford

It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could you know. That's why we wake
and look out--no guarantees
in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.

Whether you believe this moment on earth to be unprecedented or not, we are navigating something that is intense and difficult and chaotic. We have been asking ourselves, what might the conditions for belonging be in these times? How might we belong to each other, to the land, to the more than human world, to the ones who came before us and will come after us, and to ourselves in these fractured times? How might wonder disrupt the question of who gets to belong, or the existence of the question at all?

Belonging carries with it longing, tucked inside the word itself, a hint at something we are being invited to pay closer attention to as we move through the world. Our longing is a guide, a map of the territory; it tells us something about our relationship to belonging, and to the world we find ourselves in, and something about our dreams. 

Longing is the core of mystery.
Longing itself brings the cure.
– Rumi

What of a dream of belonging we don’t dip in and out of: a belonging to each other, to the land, and to life to such a degree that we stop trying to know everything and instead move on faith? In that world, you listen to what the birds are telling you, what your skin is telling you, what the fine hairs on your arms are telling you, what your heart is telling you. You match everything to your heartbeat. You risk otherness in order not to other anyone else on the human and more than human plain. You breathe through fear and anxiety and questions, and you learn to lean into the ones who welcome you, so that you, too, can be a soft landing place for others. You learn the places inside you that you turn away from, because the stories tell you to look there to find where you cannot be with others. 

To what and to whom are you committed? What do you long for?
And what is worth traveling through the unknown to reach?
– Prentis Hemphill

This week we will come together to explore what belonging and wonder and longing have to do with each other, and what unexpected liberation might be found in the heart of chaos. To navigate the work of belonging to and in ourselves, in our bodies, in our communities, on the land, by the waters. To find out what wonder makes possible. The astonishment of our daily lives deepens our experience. If we are wildly present to and in the world, wonder is necessarily going to be part of that. If we are available to be filled with wonder, we will fall in love with other people, the land, the trees, the ocean, the sunlight, the mysteries of the world. Where might that lead us?

Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them.
The least we can do is try to be there.
– Annie Dillard

"You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star” says Nietzsche. Before chaos came, in the 1600s, to mean a state of orderless confusion, it derived in part from the Greek word khaos "abyss, that which gapes wide open, that which is vast and empty", from khnwos and the PIE root ghieh "to yawn, gape, be wide open." Maybe therein lies a clue to what we might need: the capacity to be wide open, to be present, an open space for what might come, for what we cannot yet imagine is possible. Perhaps a key to all belonging is an availability to wonder, learning to not know, relaxing into uncertainty, and turning toward each other as open space, as presence, as a willingness to be utterly curious and new.

The luminous, mycelial tethers between us, 
our fundamental connection to one another, 
the raft through the sorrow, the holding through the grief joy is, 
reminds us, again and again, that we belong not to an institution or a party 
or a state or a market, but to each other. Needfully so.
– Ross Gay

Wherever wonder is invited, more space arrives for everyone – by the simple grace of what wonder brings with it and a quality of beingness that allows wonder in. This week and onward, may we grow our capacity to be an open space of not knowing, a place where the mystery might land and be expressed through us. May we imagine our way toward each other even in the breaches, even in the chasms of uncertainty. May we be rapt with attention, and alive with tenderness. May we step back from our certainties and become a breaking open of other possibilities; might chaos be, paradoxically, something that yawns wide with beauty and invitation. 

Shall we go?