Poetry of Belonging

Hannah Elizabeth King, in her natural habitat.

In order to develop a sense of place, a rootedness in the broader ecosystem, an ecological spirituality, I believe it is necessary to have a strong, unassailable feeling of belonging within the natural world that surrounds, embraces, and includes us as human beings.

Over the past millennium or two, many humans - especially those that became Europeans and later global colonists - seem to have constructed deep-seated barriers to this sense of belonging.

There exists in Western cultures a great fear - a biophobia writ large - that insists upon order and control. Our dwellings are carefully painted and caulked and trimmed, their once-living bones converted to uniform building blocks and drywalled over. Any ants and spiders and insects that make their way inside are summarily executed. We fear bears and cougars and lightning far more than the risks would justify, while we feel comfortably safe in our climate-controlled, upholstered vehicles despite the much greater risk of death or harm. Many among us prefer to live in high-rises and concrete jungles where other living creatures are welcome only when they are installed or purchased - everything else is a pest or a weed. There seems to be a broad consensus that we “modern” humans have thankfully left behind a messy, dirty, bloody world full of pestilence and suffering - a “nature red in tooth and claw” - and that we are destined for a life in fully-synthetic walled-off environs of skyscraper cities or Mars outposts or interstellar spaceships.

Alongside this fear, there is a denial of biological, physical reality within many of our major spiritual traditions. In these cosmologies, our physical world is of secondary importance to what comes after death. Earth is a temporary home, a trialing ground for souls, often viewed as “lower” than heaven and filled with forbidden fruits and carnal desires and temptations from darker forces. In some traditions, the biosphere and planet that surrounds us is all an illusion, a dreamworld of sorts from which we should seek to “awaken” to a truer, deeper reality.

Finally - and growing stronger in recent years - there exists a powerful sense of guilt among many of those who might be most inclined to belong here, those who have fallen in love with the warblers and wood thrushes and waxwings. This perspective views humans as a fundamentally and irreparably destructive force, a cancer upon the planet, who can at best hope to limit our harms and whose greatest gift to the biosphere would be our own extinction.

It is impossible to feel at home in a world that we are afraid of, a world that we view as lesser or even illusory, or a world that we believe we have damaged beyond repair. And yet I feel it is essential that we cultivate such a sense of belonging as our long age of growth and expansion comes to an inevitable end, as fossil energy reserves run out, as we seek to find meaning and purpose in a landscape of faltering technologies and collapsing mythologies. If we cannot feel at home, then how can we really feel alive? If we hold ourselves as separate, then how can we create harmony?

I have at times attempted to counter the fear and denial, to question the narrative that our planet is exceedingly fragile and mortally wounded. I think those messages are important, and yet belonging is not simply an absence of barriers. It is relational. Just as we come to belong to our families, to our churches, to our groups of friends through immersion, through countless shared hours, through contributing our own love and creativity, so too - I believe - can we come to belong to Earth.

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I feel blessed to have had the rarest of modern childhoods: free to roam through the wild and diverse habitats of the Minnesota River Valley. Perhaps I would have appreciated a few more friends at times, but I have so many memories of exploration and discovery: of cupping fireflies in young hands, of lilac and basswood fragrance wafting through bedroom windows, of lifting rocks to find bright and lightning-fast blue-tailed skinks, of building a wooden blind to get closer to the thicket-dwelling sparrows, to watch them undisturbed by my presence. Very naturally, I came to feel that I belonged there. I was even loath to leave for a few days lest I miss a thunderstorm, or the first trout lily blossom, or the night song of the whip-poor-will. As I belonged there, as a child, so I came to feel as I grew older that I belonged here, on this planet. That I could feel that same heart-connection wherever I went. That whatever comes after this life, right now the Earth is my home and being present within and upon the Earth is what matters most, what brings me the deepest joy and the deepest meaning.

I have tried to capture this feeling in my writings, especially A Walk in the Valley and A Reflection, though I tend to stray a bit into philosophy or into social commentary, away from the pure emotionality of belonging and presence.

It has always been my intention that the Dendroica Project would be a collaborative effort, multiple authors sharing ways of being, ways of seeing, a framework for an ecological spirituality not rooted in an older established tradition but rather in direct personal experience, perception, awareness, emotion. I discovered local poet Hannah Elizabeth King earlier this year and immediately felt that many of her writings resonated with my heart and with this project. She kindly offered to contribute, and I selected four poems that beautifully capture her own profound sense of belonging and her desire that we can all learn to belong in this wondrous world we inhabit.

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She Bends Her Knees Down To the Trumpet Cups of Orange Agastache

She bends her knees down to the trumpet cups of orange agastache, inhales, and in a sudden rush becomes a child in the Tetons of Wyoming. She tells stories of running free for days along creeks and forest, summers camped beside the body of jagged mountain peaks. 

My earliest scent memory is fennel. Walking through airy stalks high over my head around the wild plums at the edge of my grandparents creek, tastes of licorice hitting my tongue, pungent and sweet breezes. 

As a child, presence is innate. It is imperative to our development, growing through embodiment, completely connected and absorbed in environments, and life reveals itself, bringing each of us into its holding. If you spend your days outside, belonging is made in leaves and flower petals, in water with water skippers, sunburns and starlight, we become a part of this nature as it builds its home into us. 
 
How do I say this— when was the last time you stumbled into a plant and your precious face pressed into its resinous flower, soft oily leaves and you breathed it in and found a memory safely kept deep within yourself? And you remembered your origins, something forgotten, some tie, bond with nature?

This is the intimacy that will save the world: growing in presence, interdependent relationship with all of nature, cellular memory, tasting, touching, hearing, seeing all that is around us with wonder and an open heart. It is diving into the water, knee deep in mud, it is blending our body into the wild things and listening. 

We can form new memories. We can be like children again.

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This Is Where We Meet

Rose hips are turning
their orange bodies
to a red sheen,
while a stellar jay’s
blue wings dart 
to a fruitless tree. 
An apple falls 
to the ground;
I hold three purple
plums in my hand
and see so much 
I cannot contain—
waves of sustaining
lifeforms ripening,
it is harvest, where 
is my basket? I left
it for a moment of 
unintentional pace—
a walk without task.
Days are busy going
and doing, demanding
and fixing, while so much 
richness spoils at our feet. 
Yet this, is the miracle
of what is living, 
nothing is wasted, 
always recreated.

Looking up toward a sky 
of pearlescent light,
a hummingbird stops
in mid-flight, body like
a cross erected on a
mount of air. 

This is where it is—
what we are waiting for,
the deeper longing,
the unmet desire we keep
tracing around at the edges.
Go inside this circle, 
put yourself in the midst.
This is where we meet
our absence and our filling.

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A Spider’s Silken Web

The spider’s silken thread
attached to my chair,
arcs to meet dandelion heads,
zigzagging and moving light rays
with the first morning sun
on this first summer’s day.
I didn’t see it at first—
waving like a laundry line,
but I moved slightly so
as the earth moved with me
and I caught that golden shimmer
in my sight.

For years I did not see.

At the front of our house
holes in the pavement 
fill with rain and men complain,
that we should fix it—
I watch robins land, 
dipping their brown heads
and orange bellies
in and up and out,
feathers ruffled in the water,
and my daughter delights
as her boots trudge through,
splashing as cars do. 

For years I did not see
how the hair like strands
are always here,
connected and weaving
through our surroundings,
nearly invisible
without sitting yourself
in the right light
at the right time 
and opening your eyes.

Nothing here needs fixing.

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Pond Water Baths

As a child 
I hid in meadow grass 
and daisies, 
alone but not lonely,
grasshoppers for company
and the black oak.
I knew the arms 
of the pine 
would hold me.
I want this for you—
your unforgotten nature,
waking up to remember
sleeping with starlight
above our eyes
and pond water baths.
This is where we belong,
you and I.

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This is where we belong, you and I. Not in a cubicle. Not walled off from the world. Not on Mars. Not adrift in space. Not lost in our thoughts or glued to our screens or in a state of meditative transcendence. Not in anticipation of where we will be after our bodies die. Here, with the daisies and oaks and grasshoppers and daphne blossoms, the Dendroica warblers and Great Horned Owls and hummingbirds, the April showers and August ripening and starlight and pond water baths. Thank you, Hannah, for sharing your heart with the world.

Follow Hannah on Instagram @hannahbeeking and watch for her upcoming book of poetry: We Are Wanderers.