Belonging
What is it about a particular place that makes us feel we ‘belong’? Sometimes it’s the place where we were born and spent the first part of our life – what psychologists call the ‘Primal Imprint’. But quite often it’s a place we have no connection to at all; a place we visit and where we suddenly feel at home. Belonging to a place is rather like recognising a partner for life, that sense of recognising ‘ourselves in each other’ that Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy felt when they met again after a long separation. There’s something about the place we belong that reflects something of ourselves back to us, almost like a memory.
I’ve just begun reading Wendy Pratt’s memoir ‘The Ghost Lake’ and have been moved by that account of her childhood and her attachment to a place that’s been inhabited since human beings first migrated north after the ice. She’s telling the history of the landscape she loves as well as her own. And it’s a north country, working class voice, like my own, talking about belonging and not-belonging.
For me, it’s a small white farmhouse sitting exposed on the edge of the most westerly Lakeland fells. It’s surrounded by a garth that protects it from the wind pouring off the Atlantic. There’s something about the sturdiness of the place – stonework an arm’s length thick, rooted to the bedrock – the permanence of a place that had a neolithic stone axe head in the barn floor; a place where people had lived for thousands of years. But it’s also the wildness of the place, existing in the teeth of the weather and somehow managing to endure whatever’s thrown at it.
That sense of belonging isn’t the recognition of any trait in myself, but of how I would like to be. Sturdy, enduring. The irony is that, ever since I was a child running around the stackyard, I longed to leave. I wanted to find out where the wind came from. When I looked up at the northern stars rolling overhead I wanted to know what the other half of the sky looked like. I got my wish. I left, though the leaving was traumatic, and spent the next twenty years as a nomad. There are only two other places in the world where I’ve felt that sense of belonging – Canada’s wild north west and New Zealand’s south island. Both wild and uncompromising with the same sense of exposure and risk. I belong in wild places, among mountains and rivers scoured out by extremes of weather.
Knowing where you belong is also knowing yourself and recognising your most uncomfortable feelings. My mother longed for security; I long for the exhilaration of its opposite. That incompatibility defined our relationship. But, belonging is also knowing where to return to. When I lived in the south of England and drove up the M6 to revisit the Lake District, even after it had ceased to be home, even when there was no family left to visit, there was a powerful, visceral feeling that stopped the breath in my mouth, when the first of the fells came into view over the horizon. It was a landscape I could step into, like walking into the frame of a painting, and know that I was utterly in the right place. The farm at Rough Close, high in the Uldale fells, was the one place where the childhood me and the adult me could be together, one and the same person. It was like putting the last piece into a 3000 piece jigsaw puzzle someone had given you for Christmas.
Reading My Mother, an account of that journey, is published on the 15th September.
Really look forward to reading more.
ReplyDeleteLove how your words touch many chords.