Belonging

Praise for BELONGING and Toko-pa Turner

Certain people invite you into an experience that will alter your world view forever. They have gone so deep, searched so thoroughly, traversed territories that most would shun, and then they return and lay their soul at your feet. Toko-pa is one such individual and this book is her soul made visible. She reaches her hand out to you and asks you to take a journey with her. If you are ready, take her hand and prepare to grow.

—Clare Dubois, International Speaker and Founder of TreeSisters

An exquisitely crafted journey that explores the deep longings of the soul, the mysterious workings of our dreams, the bittersweet wisdom of the orphaned self, and the losses of our lineage that we would rather ignore. Toko-pa Turner speaks with poetry and practicality, pure compassion and profound integrity to the heart of what it means to belong to ourselves, to our people, to our communities, and to the earth. Belonging is the book I have been longing to read all my life.

—Lucy H. Pearce, Amazon bestselling author of Burning Woman, Moon Time, The Rainbow Way

Belonging is full of profound insights that flower from Toko-pa’s powerful life experiences and her resilient, compassionate spirit. To me the central message of the book is that, to be truly original, you have to experience some sort of difference or exile from the club, and take that initiatory journey. It’s a message I believe we urgently need to hear today, as there is such a strong cultural emphasis on fighting our differences rather than allowing them to bring us to a full reclamation of our own unique selves. Belonging is breathtakingly compassionate and surefooted!

—Michelle Tocher, Mythologist and Author of How to Ride a Dragon, Brave Work, The Tower Princess

I cannot recommend this book highly enough! Not only is it full of timeless wisdom and glorious insights, it’s quite possibly the most beautiful book I’ve ever read. Toko-pa’s voice is one of beauty and one of necessity in a troubled world. I consider her a vessel for genius, someone who has a direct line to the soul of the world and knows how to translate soul-wisdom into words that feel like home.

—Seraphina Capranos, Herbalist & Homeopath

Toko-pa is such a wonderful, imaginative writer. Her love, intelligence, and bright ideas are shining on every page of this book.

—Angela Gygi, Story Researcher for Paramount, HBO, Netflix

With astounding clarity and compassion, Toko-pa guides us to embody a humanity deeply rooted in our belonging and reverence for the grand dance of life we are part of. Through her exquisite word-magic, she midwifes the deep wisdom of our souls into incarnation.

—Chameli Ardagh, Founder, Awakening Women Institute

Belonging is something quite extraordinary. It’s more than just a book; it’s an experience. As I read Toko-pa’s writing, I found myself being transported, not to some distant place, but to my deepest core. Belonging is a mirror to our true face, revealing the exiled threads of our being so that we may gently re-weave them back into the greater fabric of which we are all a part. This is a book that provides living nourishment for these times and will be a classic for decades to come.

—Bethany Webster, writer and international speaker on The Mother Wound

Copyright © 2017 by Toko-pa Turner. All rights reserved. Published and distributed by Her Own Room Press (Salt Spring Island, British Columbia).

Cover art and interior illustrations copyright © 2017 by Molly Costello, used with permission. Cover layout and design by Toko-pa Turner. Author photograph: Morgaine Owens.

ISBN-13: 978-1-7751112-1-4

First electronic edition: January, 2018

www.toko-pa.com

Email Toko-pa Turner at dreamwork@toko-pa.com

For Craig —

who is the ground

in which my belonging

is rooted.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Terri Kempton, my friend and my editor, for walking with me every step of the way, masterfully midwifing the birth of this book; Angela Gygi who read the manuscript and offered me her rigorous and valuable feedback; Caoimhe Merrick for her lavish pages of enthusiasm; Michelle Tocher for encouraging me to put my story front and centre; Molly Costello who summarizes in one artwork everything I want to say; my late mentor Annie Jacobsen who, despite my reluctance, kept insisting I was a writer; and most especially Craig Paterson, my beloved husband, for showing me every day how belonging is made, through his unwavering presence, wise reflection, and the sheltering generosity of his tenderness. Finally, I want to thank Salt Spring Island, for holding me in its mystical branches, and lending its moisture to my words.

Contents

ONE

Something Greater

TWO

Origins of Estrangement

THREE

The Death Mother

FOUR

False Belonging

FIVE

The Inner Marriage

SIX

Initiations by Exile

SEVEN

The Symbolic Life

EIGHT

Trekking the Creative Wild

NINE

The Dark Guests

TEN

Pain as Sacred Ally

ELEVEN

Holy Longing

TWELVE

Competencies of Belonging

THIRTEEN

Handmaking a Life

FOURTEEN

Bearing the Pleasure

FIFTEEN

The Invitational Presence

SIXTEEN

Storywells and Songlines

SEVENTEEN

Tending a Village

EIGHTEEN

Reciprocity with Nature

NINETEEN

Conclusion

Endnotes

Author’s Note

For the rebels and the misfits, the black sheep and the outsiders. For the refugees, the orphans, the scapegoats, and the weirdos. For the uprooted, the abandoned, the shunned and invisible ones.

May you recognize with increasing vividness that you know what you know.

May you give up your allegiances to self-doubt, meekness, and hesitation.

May you be willing to be unlikeable, and in the process be utterly loved.

May you be impervious to the wrongful projections of others, and may you deliver your disagreements with precision and grace.

May you see, with the consummate clarity of nature moving through you, that your voice is not only necessary, but desperately needed to sing us out of this muddle.

May you feel shored up, supported, entwined, and reassured as you offer yourself and your gifts to the world.

May you know for certain that even as you stand by yourself, you are not alone.

Love,

Toko-pa

To this world you belong. To this moment, in this place where you already stand, something greater has ushered you. To the momentum of a long line of survivors you are bound. From their good deaths, succeeded by new lives, and to the incidents of love that seeded them, your story has been woven. With the wild jubilation of nature, you are in correspondence. By every season’s conditions, and by the invisible holy inclination, your life has been hewn.

And yet you may feel, as so many of us do, the ache of a life orphaned from belonging.

There are many ways to be made an orphan. Outright, by the parent incapable of caring for you, or by the ones who neglected to understand your gifts. By the System, which demands your loyalty but trades away your uniqueness. Or by history which, through intolerance and war, has made you a refugee.

But we are also made orphans by a culture that, in its epitomizing of certain values, rejects others, forcing us to split off from those unwanted parts of ourselves. And this is perhaps the worst orphaning act of all, because it is an abandonment in which we are complicit.

With this meagre scratch to begin it, without so much as the acknowledgment of all that we’ve been lost from, we must fare a way. We must begin with absence—a longing for what might never be assuaged—and follow it deep into the heart of exile, to discover what, if anything, can be made out of nothing. To make a foundling of the orphaned life.

Though it governs so much, belonging is rarely spoken about in the open. Like grief, death, and inadequacy, we are led to believe that to feel unbelonging is shameful and should be hidden from view. The great irony is that modern culture is suffering an epidemic of alienation, yet so many of us feel alone in our unbelonging, as if everyone else was inside of the thing that we alone are outside of. And keeping silent about our experience of estrangement is, in large part, what allows it to perpetuate.

We are living in fragmented times, with racism, sexism, xenophobia and other systemic forms of othering on the rise all over the world. Never before have we experienced such seismic migrations of humans across our borders as we do today. And the challenges of settlement and integration are vast and complex, even several generations down the line. Today, we find ourselves at a critical juncture, divided on the fault lines of politics, class, gender, and race. In its silent way, belonging is the central conversation of our times.

Certainly, one of the most influential motivators of my own life, the longing to belong, was shaping me in ways that I was largely unconscious of, until it finally grabbed me by the hair and pulled me deep into its terrifying dimensions. This book is the travelogue of the initiation that took years and a passage through seemingly endless gates, each of which required the relinquishment of something precious to me. And so, I write to you not as an expert in belonging, but as an orphan who needed to discover that there was more to lose before I could be found.

There are many different kinds of belonging. The first kind that comes to mind is the feeling of belonging in a community, or to a geography. But for many of us, longing to belong begins in our own families. Then there is the longing we feel to belong with an intimate other in the sanctuary of relationship, and the belonging we yearn to feel in a purpose or vocation. There is also spiritual longing to belong to a set of ways or traditions, the longing to know and participate in ancestral knowledge. And, though we may not even notice how its severance influences us, the ache to belong in our own bodies.

There are also subtler forms of belonging, like the one we must eventually create with our own story, and the gifts that have been forged from it. And, if we take a broader view, there is a belonging with the earth itself, which is felt (or not felt) at the heart of us all. Finally, there is the great belonging, which may be the most nebulous and persistent of all, the longing to belong to that something greater which gives our lives meaning.

The Living Bridge

In north-east India, high in the mountains of Meghalaya, the summer monsoons are so heavy that the rivers running through its valleys grow wild and unpredictable, making them impossible to cross. Centuries ago, the villagers came up with an artful solution. They planted a strangler fig on the riverbank and began to coax its ravelling roots across the river until they took hold on the opposite side.

Through a slow process of binding and weaving the roots together, the villagers created a sturdy, living bridge that could withstand the deluge of the summer rains. But because it is a labour that cannot be completed in any one person’s lifetime, the knowledge of how to bind and tend to the roots has to be transmitted to each of the younger generations who keep the practice alive, contributing to what is now a thrilling network of living root bridges throughout the valleys of Meghalaya. {note 1}

If we take the living bridge as a metaphor for the work of belonging, we can imagine ourselves being stranded on one side of a dangerous river, longing to be connected to something greater that lies beyond our reach. Whether it is the yearning to find our true place, our people, or a meaningful relationship, the longing to belong is the great silent motivator behind so many of our other ambitions.

In my years of working with dreams, I have found this longing to belong at the heart of so many people’s inquiries. It is the longing to be recognized for one’s gifts, to be welcomed in love and kinship, to feel a sense of purpose and necessity to our community. But it is also the longing to open to the sacred dimension of our lives, to feel in service to something noble, to live in magic and wonder.

Yet alienation, belonging’s dark sister, is so pervasive that we might call it epidemic. We are more technologically connected to one another than we’ve ever been, and yet never more lonely and estranged. We are the generations who have missed receiving the inheritance of knowledge that will bridge us back to belonging. But what’s worse is that, in our amnesia, we often don’t even know what’s missing.

More and more, our interactions with one another are being supplanted by machines. Whether it’s through digital communication, customer service robots, or retail machines where humans used to be, we are becoming captives of the mechanical age. Designed by corporate interest, we are reduced to consumers, cogs in the very machine to which we are beholden. This larger, often hidden entity is a substantial part of what contributes to us feeling dehumanized, giving us the sense that we are expendable. We don’t love the machine, and it doesn’t love us back.

We try to get on, contributing our small piece to the mechanical choreography of things, but there is a sense of purposelessness which plagues us. We unconsciously feel that there is something greater to which we long to belong. And though we may not be able to articulate what it is, we perceive others belonging to this greater something while we look in from the outside.

We ache to have our absence from the circle of belonging noticed. It poisons us from the inside out. Though we try to stay busy, the hidden loneliness underneath is rarely assuaged. Given the first breath of silence, there is an upwelling of alienation so great that it threatens to swallow us whole. No matter how much we accumulate or accomplish, the pang of unbelonging continues to pierce from within.

And so we treat our lives like a project for improvement, attempting to become useful, admired, impervious or savvy. We work at cutting off any unwieldiness that may be preventing us from fitting in. But as this self-development encroaches upon our inner wilderness, our dreams and our connection to the holy suffers. As we harness every last resource in service to the unconscious longing to belong, we feel less and less at home.

This is our starting place: right in that raw fissure of our lostness, down in the ache to find our place in the family of things. Before we even ask ourselves how to heal our estrangement, we must first sink down into the wound itself and apprentice ourselves to it. We must enter into the question of what has been missing from us. Of what are we being deprived? Only when we lower ourselves down into that holy longing can we get a glimpse of the majesty we are meant to become.

Dreaming Ourselves Home

Human beings have a natural urge to worship that something greater which coheres us, but we, in modernity, are living in a kind of spiritual cul-de-sac where our gifts only serve ourselves. Unlike the many shamanic cultures that practice dreamwork, ritual, and thanksgiving, Westerners have forgotten what indigenous people understand to be cardinal: that this world owes its life to the unseen. Every hunt and every harvest, every death and every birth is distinguished by beauty-making and ceremony for that which we cannot see, feeding back that which feeds us. I believe our alienation is the felt negligence of that reciprocity.

Although every culture has its own mythologies, the animistic way of seeing the world is to know that spirit lives in everything. Not just the human people, but the people with four-legs, the tall standing ones, the far-seeing feathered ones, the strong and silent cliff people, those sleeping mountain dreamers, and the always-up-for-a-conversation river people. Sometimes you can even catch spirit in the curve of a ceramic cup.

While animistic cultures live in a reciprocity with what author and Mayan shaman Martín Prechtel calls the holy in nature, we have become a culture infatuated with literality and rationalism. Divorced from myth and the symbolic life, our personal stories cease to have meaning in a larger collective momentum. Also atrophying in this separation, is our ability to imagine, wonder, and envision a way forward.

But each of us has a private gateway back into kinship with mystery—through our dreaming life. The practice of dreamwork is a powerful way of weaving back into intimate relationship with what the Sufis call the Beloved: that divine coherence, the holy in nature, from which all beings originate. As we remember it, it remembers us. Like the living bridge between two riverbanks, our conversation is the practice of belonging together. Throughout this book, I will be sharing dreams, my own and from those who have kindly given their permission, which beautifully illustrate the different gates on the path to belonging.

The way that I understand it, dreaming is nature naturing through us. Just as a tree bears fruit or a plant expresses itself in flowers, dreams are fruiting from us. The production of symbols and story is a biological necessity. Without dreams, we could not survive. And though it is possible to get by without remembering our dreams, a life guided and shaped by dreaming is a life that follows the innate knowing of the earth itself. As we learn to follow the instincts of our inner wilderness, respecting its agreements and disagreements, we are also developing our capacity for subtlety. This sensitivity is what makes us more porous and multilingual, bringing us into conversation with the many languages of the world around us.

Sensitivity is the privilege and responsibility of remembering. As Oscar Wilde wrote, a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world. As we come to understand the symmetry between the outer landscape and the inner wilderness, we can’t help but grieve the ways in which our own nature has been tampered with, denigrated, broken into obedience, and in many cases eradicated from memory. We begin to face the ways in which we are complicit in this slow apocalypse, within and without. Only from such a place of loss and longing can we begin remembering ourselves home.

This book is an attempt to exalt what I understand to be the broader definition of dreamwork: the practice of weaving a living bridge between the seen and the unseen, an endeavour that can only be made with patience, an aptitude for grief, and a willingness to assume a stake in the way things turn out, even if we won’t live to see the benefits. This is the practice of belonging.

With this writing I hope to spare you, brave wayfarer, some of the confusions on this initiatory path. I will introduce you, as I have been introduced, to the different faces of belonging and how we came to be estranged from them in the first place. We’ll look at the influences that can cause us to become diminished versions of ourselves, which is also how we are seduced into taking up residence in false belonging. We’ll meet the archetype of the outcast, and then descend into the dimensions of exile, a painful but necessary attrition into true belonging. There, we will encounter the otherness within that wants to belong to us. This is the grand endeavour I like to call Remembership. Most of us think of belonging as a mythical place, that if we keep diligently searching for, we might eventually find. But what if belonging isn’t a place at all, but a skill: a set of competencies that we, in modern life, have lost or forgotten? Like the living bridge, these competencies are the ways in which we can coax, weave, and tend to the roots of our separation—and in so doing, restore our membership in belonging.

Like so many others, my quest for belonging was seeded in alienation. I remember a recurring scene at the dinner table when, after an episode of hurt, I would run upstairs to my room in tears, desperate for my mother to come after me and coax me back into belonging. But she never came. Instead, I would creep back onto the stairs outside the kitchen, secretly listening to my family going on without me while my belly rumbled with hunger.

And though we all have our version of the waiting stairs, at its heart this is what it is to feel outside of belonging. It is the excruciating belief that you are not needed. That life does not consider you necessary. When nobody comes after you with invitations, it confirms your worst fear and sends you pushing further into the province of exile, even towards the cold beckoning of death.

Symbolically speaking, I spent many years of my life on those waiting stairs: hungry for love, aching to be recognized as missing, wishing someone might call me back into belonging. And when leaving the table wasn’t enough to make my family miss me, my departures became further, longer, and eventually total.

When I was nine, I found a condemned house that I tried to make my own. There was a small space between the two-by-fours nailed across the back door that I pried apart to gain entry. Over the weeks, I scavenged for things that could brighten up that dingy, rotting hideaway. I found a broom and swept up some of the debris, snuck away with snacks and drew pictures for the walls. Some broken furniture did well enough and, for a time, I played at being really gone.

This early impulse may have been the first sign that something in me wanted to separate, to distinguish myself from my family of origin. Even as decrepit and dangerous as it was, I was drawn to creating a new self. A life of my own. Of course, I was too young to take care of myself and when the house grew black at dusk, I would reluctantly return home without ever being noticed as missing.

When people hear that I was raised in a Sufi ashram, their faces light up. I can only imagine the exotic image it must conjure for people who come from a more conservative upbringing. Suddenly, it is as if I make some new kind of sense to people, as they call to mind whirling dervishes and the poetry of Rumi and Gibran. And it’s true that for my young heart, living in a devotional community where music, prayer and poetry were woven into every day, was a brief time of belonging. But like many spiritual communities, it also cast a profound shadow.

We had eighteen rooms in our house filled with transient devotees, but despite its sprawling size, it was far from luxurious. It was an old tenement situated in the red-light district of Montreal, with bats scratching in the walls and prostitutes and drug dealers right outside our front door. We were very poor and made do with shared resources. I remember the bitter Quebec winter when we had our utilities shut off and had to sleep huddled together by a fire. But as a child, none of this bothered me. There was always some character to be entertained by—musicians, artists, gypsies and intellectuals—and every summer we retreated to a yoga ashram in the Laurentians, with visiting teachers like the Sufi master Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan.

More than anything, I remember the music. The Sufi songs were a mixture of Hindu, Sanskrit and Arabic devotions to the Beloved. They were invocations to open the heart, to give voice to our longing to return to the divine reedbed from which we human-reeds were plucked. We were always praying and chanting zikr, dancing until we were ecstatic.

I was eight when my mother and stepfather became pregnant with my sister, and my grandmother moved our family out of the commune and into a semi-detached house in the suburbs. Perhaps it was the sudden close quarters, the stress of a having a new baby in abject poverty, or perhaps it was the suburbs themselves which felt like an alien culture to us all, but it was as if I came to know my family for the first time. Home revealed itself as a place of volatility, conflict, and neglect.

My stepfather was considered a spiritual leader in the Sufi community, but behind closed doors he was emotionally detached and physically violent. And my mother, a yoga teacher and herbalist, was one of those people who could infect you with her creativity and enthusiasm; but as easily as she’d go up, she went down. Prone to severe bouts of depression and rage for which she never sought treatment, my mother’s moods wreaked havoc in our home. Depending on the day or even the hour, she could swing from mania to despondency and meanness, so we all learned to walk on eggshells around her. In times of depression she was suicidal, deeply afflicted by her belief that nobody loved or valued her.

As a small person of eight, my heart broke for my mother. All I could see was her beauty and felt it was my mission to comfort and reassure her, pull her back into the shelter of love. But like a flash storm, her skies would darken and she would snipe at me in fits of cruelty. Perhaps because of her own unmetabolized grief, she was repulsed by any show of emotion. When I cried, she would keep a good distance from me and tell me I was being over-dramatic, or say that I’d brought it upon myself.

My earliest dreams were of my mother abandoning me. I dreamed she would leave me in a dangerous alley at night because I’d inadvertently wounded her. Or I’d be left to kidnappers who would tie me up to a bullseye and throw darts at me. Indeed, it felt like there were two versions of my mother: one who I felt responsible for, and the other who made me her target.

The more I tried to be loved, the more alone I found myself in the deepening dark. Soon I began to practice at withdrawal.

By the time I was eleven, I was preoccupied with thoughts of suicide. What I didn’t understand was that I was internalizing the rejection I felt from my family. Suicide was the ultimate self-rejection; it was a way to ‘make real’ the deadening impulse that was closing in on my heart. When I was fourteen going on fifteen, I ran away for good. For a while, I panhandled for money, slept on floors, and made the worst kinds of friends. Eventually I was apprehended by the police who took me to a detention shelter where I was committed into what we called the System.

The System was an organization of government-run, ironically named ‘care facilities’ for orphans. Some of us were abandoned, some abused or neglected, some with