Quotes about Belonging

Everything has its own place and function. That applies to people, although many don't seem to realize it, stuck as they are in the wrong job, the wrong marriage, or the wrong house. When you know and respect your Inner Nature, you know where you belong. You also know where you don't belong.

Better to join in with humanity than to set ourselves apart.

No road shows the way,
Kotaro said in a poem, the road
follows behind.

When Su Tung-p'o was
an old man, his house burned down.
He laughed, "Now I can see the stars!"

This world is only process, a single
monumental motion
without beginning, without end.

We like to think this world is ours,
but we belong to it,
to a world just being born.

Imagine that the whole world belongs to you.  The birch trees in New Hampshire's White Mountains are yours, and so are the cirrus clouds in the western sky at dusk and the black sand on the beaches of Hawaii's big island.  You own everything, my dear sovereign - the paintings in all the museums of the world, as well as the internet and the wild horses and the roads.

Please take good care of it all, OK?  Be an enlightened monarch who treats your domain with reverent responsibility.  And make sure you also enjoy the full measure of fun that comes with such mastery.  Glide through life as if all of creation is yearning to honor and entertain you.

I am a book of snow,
a spacious hand, an open meadow,
a circle that waits,
I belong to the earth and its winter.

A city man is a home anywhere, for all big cities are much alike. But a country man has a place where he belongs, where he always returns, and where, when the time comes, he is willing to die.

The Earth is what we all have in common.

Human beings "belong" to some minor comity or enclave of faith at the expense of the clarity and autarkia of their intelligence and conscience, of course.  "Belonging" is another way of saying:  "capitulating to."

In contrast to how a child belongs in the world, adult belonging is never as natural, innocent, or playful.  Adult belonging has to be chosen, received, and renewed.  It is a lifetime's work.

The day is a chase after ghost duties; at evening you are exhausted.  A day is over, and so much of it was wasted on things that meant so little to you, duties and meetings from which your heart was absent.  Months and years pass, and you fumble on, still incapable of finding a foothold on the path of time you walk.  A large proportion of your activity distracts you from remembering that you are a guest of the universe, to whom one life has been given.  You mistake the insistent pressure of daily demands for reality, and your more delicate and intuitive nature wilts...  Your way of life has little to do with what you feel and love in the world but because of the many demands on you and responsibilities you have, you feel helpless to gather your self; you are dragged in so many directions away from true belonging.

As you grow, you develop the ideal of where your true belonging could be - the place, the home, the partner, and the work.  You seldom achieve all the elements of the ideal, but it travels with you as the criterion and standard of what true belonging could be.

Our bodies know they belong; it is our minds that make our lives so homeless.

Southerners have a gene, as yet undetected in the DNA spirals, that causes them to believe that place is fate.  Where you are is who you are.  The further inside you a place moves, the more your identity is intertwined with it.  Never casual, the choice of place is the choice of something you crave.

We live in a world that responds to our longing; it is a place where the echoes always return, even if sometimes slowly.

There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives.  Those who are lucky enough to find it ease like water over a stone, onto its fluid contours, and are home.  Some find it in the place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert.  There are those born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city.  For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe.  We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.

The hunger to belong is not merely a desire to be attached to something.  It is rather sensing that great transformation and discovery become possible when belonging is sheltered and true.

He felt married to her, that was all.