Belonging
In this episode we explore how to connect with the place where we live - and why we need to do so…
A number of themes coming together this week. One was a conversation with a friend about the nature of social-trauma - she was working on an essay about that for her social-studies degree, and had asked me to review it. We talked about place, and the difficulties that arise when we lose connection with it. Which lead in turn to a reminder about a post I’d written perhaps a decade back, about ‘Belonging’, ‘the longing to be’, and thence to the sense of loss depicted in the melancholy of Portuguese fado and in some forms of ‘the blues’.
Then later in the week, another chat with a colleague who’d found himself somewhat stranded in the Netherlands during the pandemic, and the challenges he’d had in finding a way to feel back ‘at home’ again there after so many years away. Which brought up a line from my old book Needles of Stone (which I’d written almost half a century ago now!), that “There is an interaction between people and place - and the place has choices too”.
Which brings me to the situation that I’m in right now, here in Australia, and to the Aboriginal concept of ‘country’. And whether, and how, and if, I can actually belong here at all. (Or anywhere else, for that matter…)
To most of us, perhaps, ‘country’ is little more than a geographical label for some arbitrary region of the globe. Your passport bears its name, you pay your taxes there, there’s a tedious bunch of squabbling idiots who call themselves ‘the government’ of that country, but that’s about it, really.
By contrast, though, the Aboriginal concept of ‘country’ is much deeper, more complex, more nuanced, more multi-layered. Country is where you were born; country is where you are; country is the place that nurtures you; country is the space and place for you which you are responsible. You can’t possess country: if anything, it possesses you. And perhaps above all, country is where you belong:
And yes, I too might have some delusions that all of that above - or some, at least - might also be said to apply to me:
Oh, sure, it actually did apply to me, pretty much, during most of the not-quite-two-decades that I’d lived here from the late 1980s to the mid 2000s. Yes, I had all that surface-level stuff: the passport, the taxes, the usual grumbles about government and all that. Yet some of the deeper stuff, too: I’d lived on a fair-sized place about sixty miles out of Melbourne, spending much of my time playing folk-music with friends (I played bass-flute, if you’re interested), and planting trees, trees and more trees on the previously not-quite-barren block. There was even a comment from a local Aboriginal elder who’d said that reading my book Needles of Stone was the first time he’d realised that Anglo culture had once had something sort-of equivalent to the Dreaming. So yeah, alone then, as always, but on occasion I’d almost sort-of felt that I’d almost sort-of belonged, ish.
Then back to those long, debilitating years in Britain, where knew I didn’t belong. But then I never had, of course - despite it supposedly being my own nominal ‘country’, in that Aboriginal sense.
At last, at last, at long last, my duty done, there’s a return to Australia. But this time, the very opposite of a homecoming: almost literally, everything fell apart the very day that I arrived, and hasn’t really recovered ever since. Not just COVID-lockdowns and all that, which trashed every plan that I’d had, and again left me with no income at all; but perhaps even more, if more subtly, an inability to connect with country.
No way to belong.
My response has been all too predictable, I suppose: closing myself off, becoming more and more of a recluse, all those classic mistakes. Withdrawn so much now that I spend most of my time in one small corner of one small room, in the dark, curtains drawn to keep out the cold and the over-bright light, barely even going outside the front door most days. And hardly connecting with the world at all, other than through a screen. Not A Good Idea…
And it’s not exactly healthy, either: I hate to think how much weight and waist I’ve put on, sitting slumped over in an office chair, unmoving, day after day, in these past two COVID-raddled years. Ouch…
Here in this closed-up house I’m sort-of surviving, yes - but I’m not really living at all. And if I’m ever to be able to connect with country again - to belong in this country again - then I need somehow to break out of my current cowardice, break out of this self-imposed box, look out and beyond the current glumph and the gloom of this place:
…and instead get out there, talk with (and, in my case especially, listen with) people and with place, find ways with others to build and rebuild a shared world that’s worth living in, and living with; and seek out and share its strangenesses such as this towering moss-filled crack at Hanging Rock:
Yet that was the original plan for this Small Changes newsletter, of course: get out, move around, enquire, explore, share. It kind of hasn’t happened, though: instead, too much stuck in my own limbo, my own closed box, complaining about politics and other such delusions, not really moving on at all. And yeah, I do apologise for that - though I’d hope that some of it has been useful too.
There are quite a few things I need to finish off before I can move on: tools and methods for my business, some book-projects, things like that. But once they’re done, it’s time to get out there, connect with country again. And recreate that sense of belonging.