One of the questions in the small group Soul Matters packet for this month’s theme (Interdependence) is:
Some of us live in a place and others of us belong to a place.
Have you found a place you belong to yet?
I’ve been thinking about this question and the larger question of belonging to a place a lot lately. It has come up for me as I work in my garden and on my home, as I tend to my pets and chickens and decide to leave a house spider be, and as I walk on local trails and take note of the changing seasons. It comes up in visits to the Farmer’s Market and in preparations for the upcoming Procession of the Species. It’s there in a wave to a neighbor or a quick chat with an acquaintance outside the library. It’s there in choosing to support a local business, and it’s there in attending a local play or live music concert. I have a deep sense of belonging to this place, this land, this community, and this is where the reality of interdependence becomes tangible for me.
It’s also come up in my reading, in poems by Wendell Berry, in essays by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and in the reading for the class on Science, Nature, and Spirituality that I am teaching right now, the book Rooted by Lyanda Haupt. Haupt has a lovely tenet of rootedness that she names as “Kith”:
“Where kin are relations of kind, kith is relationship based on knowledge of place —
the close landscape, “one’s square mile,” as Griffiths writes, where each tree and
neighbor and robin and fox and stone is known, not by map or guide but by heart.
Kith is intimacy with a place, its landmarks, its fragrance, the habits of its wildlings.”
I like this idea of “Kith” as well because it is a relationship that is formed through intention and choice. We may know vaguely that we are related to all other life on earth and yet keep it all at a distance. Or we may know that we are related and also be deeply familiar and intimate with the rest of this interconnected web of existence.
So this month as we explore Interdependence I invite you into deeper relationship with place and an opportunity to Belong:
Attend the forum sponsored by the Environmental Action Team this coming Sunday April 14th at 11:30am to hear speakers from the Puget Sound Estuarium and learn more about our local Estuary.
Join me and the OUUC Nature Group to walk at Mima Mounds together and admire the local wildflowers on Saturday April 27th at 9am.
Join with others from OUUC to end local food insecurity with this year’s Hunger Walk on May 5th.
And get those bikes ready! Join the Earth Day Ride to the Market on April 20th and then join the OUUCyclists team for the Bike Commuter Contest all of the month of May.
And, of course, come and join us in Community at OUUC on Sundays for worship, Thursdays for dinner and other programming, and all week long with amazing groups, classes, work parties, and more!
