Belonging

As I have mentioned earlier in this blog, the death of my sister in the days after we were born left me feeling that I was 'all alone out there', that I didn't belong anywhere or to anyone. Being weird - fey - from the beginning also made me an outsider, other. If I have had a neurosis, or challenge to overcome, it has been of feeling that I belong. I have discovered that a good part of this is purely chemical, for when I take taurine or lithium or just nutritional yeast with all its amino acids, I feel this sense of separation less, or not at all.

Nevertheless, in times of stress or crisis, I go right back to that feeling of 'not belonging', feeling at odds with the present time and culture and that the world doesn't want, let alone appreciate what I have to offer. Now, this is not a 'poor me' story. I am just reporting on the inner landscape. My (also vastly intelligent) cousin cannot believe that a smart person such as myself could ever suffer from this. It just isn't in his worldview at all.

So.

All my life I said 'I am my father's daughter, because I am nothing like my mother' (I do sound like her and have the same sense of humour, but those are minor, in my opinion.) This from having regular communications from both of them, all my life, on an etheric level.

Well, as it happens, I am indeed my father's daughter. I am more like my father's side of the family than I could ever hope to dream. Not merely physically, although that too. We have the same intellect, the same (sarcastic) sense of humour, the same talents, the same values, and orientation to life. Over and over again this is shown to me, these last three years.

And then today, the ultimate: after my ranting about the moral turpitude of one of our local business owners, another cousin of mine said to me that our Nana, my father's mother, would be so proud of me and love me so much, that what I had said reminded so much of her.

I belong. To this tribe. This vast rollicking, hard-working, loving, brawling, never-give-up clan.
I am theirs and they are mine.

Thank you, Dad.

Addendum: In the midst of writing this, I had a phone call from my dear friend Mary Wiseman, who interprets Lady Washington at Mount Vernon, thanking me for an 18th century embroidered pin cushion I sent her for her interpretation. She called it, the very spirit of the 18th Century embodied as it lay in her hand. She re-iterated to me as she has many times that I am 'too gracious, kind, knowledgeable, rarefied' for this world, that I should be teaching 'all this' - arts and graces, as well as the spiritual - to people in some historic place, and lamented that she wasn't in a position to make that happen, as she once was when we were at Colonial Williamsburg together.
But I get it. I belong there too - to the ageless, to the ages, to times past and ways past, ways of being past.

Yes. I do.