October: We Belong to Each Other

True security builds in an interwoven way.
It can be cultivated within, yes, but it grows
in and through the bonds we share with others:
in relationships, in communities and in the larger
cultural fabric to which we belong.

—Naava Smolash

I’m just landing back in the daily routine of my life after having spent three glorious days on the edge of the continent at a retreat with some of my nearest and dearest. Integration back into regular life after this retreat has called into focus for me that while we are individuals, we are also in deep connection with others, whether we are aware of it or not, and whether we are in conflict or in symmetry.

I returned from the Oregon coast with a renewed appreciation for the lifegiving power of belonging and have been thinking the past few days about how, at the end of it, we really are just pack animals wired for connection. I believe we are not just connected with other people, but other species and the many ecosystems of our planet, as well. I always feel this most deeply when I’ve been able to stand in front of the ocean for a few days.

A while back, I was listening to an episode of Glennon Doyle’s podcast We Can Do Hard Things, in which she interviews Palestinian-American doctor Thaer Ahmad. While introducing Dr. Ahmad, Glennon implores her listeners to remember that “we belong to each other.” I was cruising along on my morning bike ride when that arrow of truth stopped me short and brought me to tears immediately. 

She’s right. We belong to each other. And it felt like an imperative honor and joy to be reminded of that. Of course, most of us have heard about the research confirming that secure relationships increase our physical and mental well-being, as well as our life span. But, perhaps we have moments of forgetting the importance of belonging. I know I do.

I’d like to leave you with this exquisite poem by Danusha Laméris called How Often One Death. Someone very close to my heart shared it with me recently, and I couldn’t stop reading and re-reading it. I think it captures so perfectly, in the way poetry often does, that we belong to each other.

How Often One Death

How often one death carries another. Like when
my painting teacher, Eduardo, died and the cat
he’d had for years succumbed the same month
to the same rare ailment. Or how when they buried
my friend’s grandfather in Japan, the pond-full of koi
he’d tended all his life, sickened, turned belly up.

Who or what is in our keeping? A house, unoccupied,
quickly sinks into itself, turns earthward.

Long-married couples are known to give up
the ghost within hours of each other.

Think of the hum that holds the walls together,
the roof high, keeps the rot at bay a little longer.

As surely as we, too, are pinned here by others,
whose presence urges our cells to replicate, our lives
more single than we imagine. Even the woman
I can’t see, who lives in a studio on the other side
of the wall. She washes a dish and the water runs through
the pipes between us, like blood through the arteries
of a single heart.

As always, thank you for sharing your time with me. I’ll see you back here in November.