On Belonging

Finding home in the wild places

Last weekend, I spent some time in the mountains, attempting to find quiet between the infinite interruptions of my sweet children, who, I am confident, may be bottomless pits. Between the moments where they need me, or more so, need me to find them snacks, I attempted to find the wild spaces in the mountains that match the ones within me. These moments are never enough, though, because motherhood means attempting to juggle the longing for quiet and connection while also having someone throw you a new object to juggle every fifteen minutes, thirty if you are lucky. You learn to maximize the spaces you do get, and that is exactly what I was doing.

There is something about the wild spaces of nature that have evolved into a home—the places I go to remember who I am, where I came from, and find the courage to keep hoping. As an adoptee, home is an elusive creature that you instantly feel disconnected from when you come into the world. Your mother—the home you knew for nine months—is suddenly missing. Where other newborns are nestled within the embrace of the ones they recognize via smell, sound, and touch, adoptees are thrust into a disconnection they have no means of comprehending. So begins the search to belong.

Some of us will search for it in people, others will look in places or organizations, many will look in substances, and, in the most heartbreaking cases, suicide when they cannot find the home they so desire. Adoptees are four times more likely to attempt suicide than non-adoptees—a statistic that any adoptee will tell you exists because feeling a pervasive sense of not belonging takes a mighty toll on us. I could fill a book with the many winding paths (mostly dead ends) of things I have searched for, and perhaps I will someday. For now, what matters is that the wild spaces in nature have become the closest thing I know to the arms a newborn knows after birth. It has not always been so, though.

As a child, my adoptive family was the sort that drove to national parks to picnic. Nature was a thing to be viewed and enjoyed, not made into a home. My adoptive parents grew up in the heart of Chicago, and they will be the first to tell you that they are not entirely outdoorsy folk. I developed an arguably irrational and slightly unhealthy fear of bears during one trip to Sequoia National Park (a fact that the Jungian in me now sees as not merely a random event). Bears, largely believed by many cultures to be a symbol of the Great Mother, were the ravenous creatures I was certain would be literally everywhere in the woods. Do I think that it would be total random happenstance that the orphan girl, with a gaping mother wound, would have a tedious relationship with the archetypal energy of a bear, or the Great Mother? No.

Between my bear phobia and the picnic lunch vibe that I grew up with, when it came to nature, I would never have guessed that She would become my soul’s home.

Somewhere along the way, adoptees find themselves at a fork in the road: Either continue your never-ending journey for a perfect home that was taken from you without your consent or accept that what never was will never be. We cannot rewind time to rescue that infant who longed for what they once knew, but we can offer it to them now. The same is true for non-adoptees. Perhaps this is why I write about the acceptance of reality so damn much. Having fought like hell against my reality for plenty of years, I know that great suffering does not reside in the reality itself, but in the insistence that we can change it. Those of us, who have lived in the shadows of the choices of others, know this in our DNA. Through the years, as I accepted that no one was coming to save me from my past or myself, I took on the responsibility for building a connection with home and belonging—the one that I was consenting to, unlike the past. When I allowed it, the wild places spoke to me.

Resting in the arms of the woods, diving under the methodical waves of the Pacific, and wandering the mossy bogs of Ireland speak to me louder than the critical voices that tell me I do not belong and have no home to call my own. If this sounds like some real bullshit, I promise I understand. A professor I travelled to Peru with once told me that she found her Great Mother in nature, and I remember being deeply annoyed about it. Nature seemed no substitute for the mother I wished could have held me then and now. In truth, it isn’t in many ways.

I cannot explain how it came to be that I trust wild places to hold me. It seems an elusive mystery, but I know somehow that She speaks to me in the wind and water, through the moose and her calf that we stumble upon, through the deer in the Irish woods, and in the way the sun sets behind the pines or reflects in glassy saltwater. I only know, She is there and She is home. When the people I adore and trust in my life fail me (and they will, as I will them, because: human), I know I can find my place in it all again when I follow my own wild into the wilds.

It makes sense, then, that when I drove back to the city on Sunday, I felt grief. I always do when I leave Her and return to life in the suburbs. True, I find nature in these spaces, too. I could talk for days about my love for my gardens and watching bees toiling away. Daily, I muse over the starlings and robins plucking worms from my lawn. I have an irritating love for the resident garter snakes that insist on sneaking up on me while I plant and weed. The wilds are different in my neighborhood, though. They’re tamed and manicured and not the messy, but somehow ordered, wild places that give me my deepest rest.

I grieve departing these wild places in the same way I imagine my infant self grieved leaving my birthmother. I hate it every time, but it is a part of reality. So, I work to accept and make space for my reality as the grief cradles me, too. I know my soul belongs in the wilds of nature—it is with Her that I belong. We share sister stardust in the fibers of our being. When I am away, I feel it in me and I ache at times. Yet, to know the aches and losses of goodbyes is to know you are alive.

These times are exhausting, as you know. The weight of our world presses on our psyches and we are more disconnected from nature than ever before. I will not tell you that going into the woods, or wading in the creek, or diving in the waves will cure you of having to face reality. It won’t. Perhaps if you let yourself be held for a while, you will remember that you are made of the same matter as these wild places. If you practice letting go of all you imagined should be, She may meet you in this space that you have cleared out for yourself. Then, perhaps you can discover what you have always wondered: You do, in fact, belong.