Mobile homes of belonging
Hi Friends,
This week I’m sharing the intro essay I wrote last fall as part of a collective piece in the LA Review of Books called, “At Home in Los Angeles.” Writing is so often a solitary act, which can slip into loneliness and depression without specific effort to stay connected to people, places and things outside yourself. And creating out of that isolated space affects the the quality, direction and sustainability of the work itself.
For years, a bunch of us rogue writers got together for “Writers Salon” every Friday afternoon in Atwater Village’s eclectic Bon Vivant cafe to work on our own projects, but in the unbroken ring of our laptops’ glow. A hipster campfire of sorts. It saved our mental health. And birthed some lifelong friendships. I miss the crew and the weekly rhythm of hugs and nursing a cup of coffee over 3 hours. But I’m also grateful for a lived experience of how essential that nest of relationships is to incubate the artist’s life and work.
I want to thank three of my friends who have become mobile homes of belonging in their lives and work (and point you to their inspiring way of being artists in the world). Thank you for including me in your lives and for building a beautiful relational infrastructure that’s changing the world, Janice Littlejohn, Ellie Robins, and Shane Boris. You all help me GET IT RIGHT when I’m confused.
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from At Home in Los Angeles
“There’s no place like home.”
Dorothy’s mantra inThe Wizard of Oz captures our universal yearning for belonging — our deepest, most basic human need. This yearning for the sense of security, place, identity, and purpose home provides has become dire amidst our “Great Unraveling,” this collective, painful disconnecting from self and each other, from purpose and our world.
Is “home” — be it a place, a nest of relationships, an endeavor, or an inward state of being — something we can ever return to given how much we and the world keep changing? How, with the right combination of heel clicks, do we rehome ourselves? Or can we, like a turtle, make a home wherever we are?
Homecoming is an ancient, human journey reflected in such foundational texts of Western civilization as the Odyssey and the biblical creation story of Adam and Eve. Yet we find ourselves in a historically new moment of soul-level homelessness in life. Over the last several decades, the social landscape has fragmented, exacerbated by tech and COVID-19, but the anomie has been a longer time coming. We’re just now feeling the pile-on. It’s hard to not experience it as a total existential crisis, which isn’t the best brain state for creative solutions. Despair is understandable, but it is not inevitable. We know in our bones that it doesn’t have to be this way, that we can commit to putting “the stubborn ounces of our weight” into a lifestyle of reconnecting and making a new home, on a more just and loving foundation, in what may feel like a social wasteland.
As of its 2020 survey, Cigna Health reports that almost 60 percent of the US adult population is lonely. And in March 2022, the CDC noted the accelerating mental health issues among teenagers, with one in five having considered suicide. More than half of seniors consider TV their primary companion. And over 40 percent of millennial women fear loneliness more than a cancer diagnosis. Beyond erosion in quality of life, we are also facing dire physical, mental, and civic health damage, not to mention the risk of early mortality due to loneliness and purposelessness. Loneliness is the result of not having our belonging needs met, and the drivers of this are complex and varied: from systemic inequity to the disaffiliation from groups to mass relocation to cities.
The awareness and intentionality that this moment is asking of us is nothing short of radical. And if there’s anything we humans tend to like less than change, it’s sacrifice, especially when we feel that we have nothing left to give. But as both Viktor Emil Frankl, an Austrian philosopher and Holocaust survivor, and the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. remind us, the human goods required for flourishing will always require an uncommon level of commitment and sacrifice, drawing from deep wells of courage and grit beyond ourselves. Even if a few of us can carve out a path home for ourselves via our own interior resources and the opportunities within our unique context, that is an exhausting lifestyle. And the kind of homecoming for humanity that we need will require building a bedrock of belonging, together. And just as Dorothy learned, we cannot find our way home alone.
Meditation apps, gratitude journals, and happiness calendars are great. But they will not get us there. It is a communal breakdown that has produced such profound non-belonging, and it will be a creative, communal response that begins to heal it. One possible step is befriending this shared loneliness as a signal of our very normal need for each other — for meaning and purpose, and for security, needs to be met in simpler, more ancient ways. By embracing the fact of our belonging and our capacity, as social creatures wired to connect, to create connection and belonging everywhere, we can do this with the simplest, most sincere micro-gestures of care.
Slowing down in the midst of our daily grinds to make eye contact with strangers in passing can reduce the sense of loneliness. By asking someone’s name and how they’re doing, we are validating their existence and broadening our own — sowing the seeds of belonging in our shared context. When we listen to someone else’s story, the neurotransmitters in our brains sync, creating an initial bond of trust. Surely these repeated acts of coming towards each other — where we are, as we are — are things we all can do as first steps in moving each other home. And as we rebuild the conditions for home in these tiny moments and spaces, we begin the necessary rebuilding for larger moves towards a collective sense of home.
If we develop eyes to see them, we will begin to recognize the opportunities to say yes, with hope and humility, to what our inner and outer lives are offering us as paths home to ourselves, to each other, and to worthy purposes. One yes leads to another, and we become nothing less than mobile homes of connection and belonging everywhere we are.
Sending ruby slippers and clarity to get it right from the belonging frontier,
Cat
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