The Architecture of Belonging

The Architecture of Belonging

It is May in California, and I’m spending a lot of time in our garden. We live in a townhouse, and so what we have to work with is a pretty narrow strip, about four feet deep and twenty-five feet wide, along the rear wall of our patio. Because the space is limited, I spend a lot of time thinking about the color and form and volume and density of plants, in addition to their light and water needs, so that I can orient them in ways that maximize their growth, and fit into the vertical and textural layering that I’m trying to achieve so that the garden has depth and height and composition. When I transplant something, I often find myself putting it tentatively in the ground, stepping back, and then rotating it, sometimes again and again until it fits into the three dimensional puzzle of place. I try to see its structure, and then anticipate how it will grow in three dimensions, as a sculptural form.

Plants are very rarely symmetrical. Most are phototrophic, and they grow toward the light, and what this often means is that they grow at angles, bend, twist, tilt, or send shoots or branches out in search of optimal light conditions. From whatever basic geometry they are endowed with by nature, the conditions of their environment shape the way that they grow. A couple of weeks ago, we spent a few days on the California coast, where Monterey Cypress trees are planted near the ocean, and sculpted by the prevailing onshore winds into slopes. Looking at the trees from the side, you can see that their primary bulk is on their protected sides, the side away from the wind, and that they angle into the wind like a wedge, splitting it around them. This is the adaptational process whereby a plant responds to its environment. The forest that I steward is composed largely, at the top of the canopy, by Douglas fir trees. Many of them are well over a hundred, some of them over two hundred years old. The biggest oldest trees are densely green at the top, but have dropped lower branches, the remains of which hang from them as gnarled snapped-off limbs, amputated by windstorms, or simply by decay. As the trees grow taller, the branches at the top needle out, and those lower down lose a bit more access to light. In a tree like this, the branches at the top are responsible for most of the photosynthesis, and those further down gradually die off, de-priorized by the tree’s search for light.

Through one lens, we are like plants, endowed with some element of innate structure by our genetics, by spirit, if you believe in that, by the lineage of our blood. Yet we are also born into nested contexts: of family, community, culture, place. All of these contexts can and do exhibit shaping force(s) on us, some of which we are aware of, and many which impact us in ways that may be outside of our conscious awareness.

If you grew up on the moon–you didn’t, I know that–where gravity was one sixth of what it is on earth, you would move differently. Sometimes we don’t realize that our families, our communities, our cultures, and our place exhibit shaping forces like gravity, like wind, like occasional sunshine. We grow, particularly as we are arriving as infants, and then as young children who are not in control of our environments at all, in adaptational ways. We grow toward the light where we can, and sometimes we are thwarted. A plant grows around an obstacle, turns around a corner, adapts, adjusts. Sometimes if the pressures are too extreme, the landscape too devoid of nutrients, we turn inward on ourselves.

What is healing? Through a certain lens, when we speak about healing, what we are talking about is grasping the innate structure of someone’s yearning to belong, and then optimally fostering that architecture. Like the cypress, the Douglas fir, or the succulent in my garden, each of us has some form of innate structure. It may have been supported or thwarted in different places along our developmental pathways. Like the Cypress, we may have had to tilt against a wind. Like the Douglas fir, as we grew taller, we may have dropped lower branches, earlier attempts at belonging.

In our work, we try to help people understand that the root drivers of wellbeing are the connections that we foster: the architecture of our relatedness.

This relatedness is to ourselves: a deep sense of connection to, and acceptance of who we are. At forty-six years old, I realized recently that I have just arrived at a place that I am no longer ashamed of myself. Can we accept and embrace who we are? Can we hold ourselves with tenderness? Can we forgive our mis-steps? Are we enough for ourselves? When we look in the mirror, do we recognize the person staring back at us? Do we love them?

Are we deeply connected to the bodies that we are wearing? Can we inhabit our own skin with ease? Can we enjoy the sensory and sensual experiences of being in a body? Can we fully experience our own emotions? Can we keep ourselves steadily in the present moment?

Do we experience ourselves as being connected to something larger than ourselves?

This relatedness is to others: Are we able to tend the relationships that we care about, and do we? Do we have a sense of belonging? With a companion? As part of a family or families? As parts of various communities: of work, of play, of meaning, of culture, of lineage, of ancestry, of spirit? Can we forgive one another when we are harmed? Can we forgive one another when merely disappointed? Can we prioritize peace over being right? Can we seek to understand others more than being understood? Do we like who we are in our relationships with others? Do we get to bring our full selves into our relationships? Do we feel seen by others, heard, cared for?

This relatedness is to the Living World: Do we belong deeply to a place? Do we know the geology, the soil, the plant life, the insect life, the animal life? Do we know the weather, the elements, the celestial realms? Do we experience ourselves as being part of Nature? Do we have non-human kin? Do we feel our relatedness with the rivers, forests, mountains, deserts? Do we take care of them? Do we have a deep and abiding sense of being at home on planet earth? Do we take care of her?

The connections that we nourish are the structure of our wellbeing. They are also, non-coincidentally, the weave of our ways of knowing.

Sometimes we don’t have a sense of the innate architecture of our yearning for connection. Sometimes this innate awareness has been so thwarted by environments that failed to keep us safe that we can’t feel it at all. We experience ourselves as alone: we moderns are lonely in profound ways. In the United States, the Cigna Loneliness Index tells us that 54% of Americans report that they are lonely, and 48% say that no one knows them well. This is an index of our disconnection. It paints a startling portrait of a civilization that doesn’t understand what makes humans well.

And yet, importantly, in all but the most extreme cases, the antidote to this disconnection can be overcome through awareness, and through the practice of developing connections that are organized around the particular structure of your yearning for connection. We are hard-wired for this.

In much the same way that ancestral people would have looked upon modern exercise regimes as absurd– You’re going to go inside and move a bunch of steel weights around because why? a lot of traditional cultures find the notion of actively practicing connection somewhat bizarre. This is because, in ancestral and Indigenous cultures, connection practices ARE culture. The rituals of culture polish and renew relatedness. The idea that you would create a regimen of practices to cultivate connection is utterly foreign, because connection is the water in which these cultures swim. And yet for us moderns, this water of connection is often largely absent, and so we need a plan, and we need help.

So now let’s turn our attention to this question of your particular architecture of optimizing connection...