You Belong to Me

I have a cousin in New Jersey who is 83. He and his wife meet us for lunch in Rhinebeck once a year. Because of the age difference, my cousin went off to college when I was only seven, so I barely knew him growing up. But now, I look at him over the chicken salad and I see my mother's nephew. When it's time to say goodbye and drive home, I'm bereft. It's like losing my mother again and again.

You belong to me, I think, watching him walk to his car, and I belong to you. This yearning to connect has always been with me, lurking in the background, often unnoticed. I hardly know it's there. It was the thin air I struggled to breathe growing up on the fourteenth floor of the apartment building on 83rd street with all of the other strangers in all of the boxes stacked high off the asphalt. No neighborhood children in the yard asked me to come out to play. No paper boy tossed the funnies onto the porch steps. When the front door slammed shut on 14E, the separation was complete. It was cozy in winter when the sleet drummed against the windows and the sun went down at 4:30. But in summer, you could see people through the gauzy curtains, out on the street far below, in the lingering daylight savings twilight. You could see them strolling by eating ice cream cones and you wondered...why are they so far away, so untouchable?

It could be that the flavor of this childhood, coming-of-age in Manhattan cooped up and sorted like an advertising flier into a post office mail slot, informed my resistance to joining. On one side of the scale, the breathless desire for belonging; on the other, the fear of it. Fear of membership, of the expectations of community, of choosing an identity that somehow excluded other identities. What would it mean to be unconditionally a Jew, a woman, those weighty nouns? I have crouched low in the trenches of that battleground for almost 72 years, but now I see a new story cresting the hill, a detente between desire and fear. The new story arises out of the discovery that communities are constantly in motion, more like verbs than nouns, while the nouns themselves are mercurial, gender identities unfolding on a spectrum, spiritual traditions freely borrowing from one another.

Communities merge and diverge like the reflecting surfaces of a kaleidoscope, each of us belonging to a great many shifting configurations. Just think of the temporal and spatial axes for starters. We belong to our families, from the mothers who cut our toenails and painfully combed the knots out of our hair, all the way back to someone foraging for mushrooms in the steppe. We carry the backpack of their genetic material wherever we go. My cousin is part of that baggage of blessing. Our stories interpenetrate their stories in the white spaces between the lines of text the way every line of Torah resonates with all the interpretations of all the readers across the millennia. This awareness of belonging to the line of kinship, passing the inheritance along from generation to generation for better or for worse, is a familiar understanding, a sometimes deep, sometimes maudlin acknowledgment of origins.

My belonging to all the world in the present instant is a more recent, a more radical discovery. It turns out that the skin on my belly is a membrane somewhat arbitrarily separating what I have already known or digested from everyone and everything out there that I could come to know. Costa Ricans, horses, the sky and the surf in varying shades of blue. With so many possibilities, belonging is not an imprisonment, an irrevocable condition. Belonging is an ongoing series of decisions to cultivate curiosity and trust, a recurring dream. Children know this. Once, I walked the length of a porch with my granddaughter when she was, maybe, 18 months. At the end, we came to a big step that led to the yard. Without a word, she held out her tiny hand for help. We took the big step together just as I take the big step with my cousin every year, drawing him close then letting him go. The communities that I belong to are affiliations of the heart. The people I make art with, the people I meditate with, the people I break bread with, the food I eat and the people who harvest it. I belong to you and you belong to me.
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I posted this link to an article in Orion Magazine on the seventysomething Facebook page...but in case you didn't see it, please read.
https://orionmagazine.org/article/speaking-of-nature/

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