Today I open our new blog. We are going to explore thoughts and experiences, questions and stories having to do with belonging. Some contributions will be deeply personal and other will be more philosophical or even political. The texts may be coherent or incoherent, eloquent or fragmentary. Some aspects of belonging have no words. Perhaps there will be a picture or a sound that explains it better. We want to invite you to share your stories of belonging. And now I am going to share mine.
An inner happiness surrounded by a wall. The wall is a necessary protection when the arrows want to hit me at every unexpected moment from every unexpected direction. I can’t duck, hit after hit makes this impossible.
Every second it can happen again – from a new direction that I didn’t even imagine existed. Every millimeter, every millisecond is a great danger. The wall protects me, I hear the hits like bouncing tennis balls, like hard rain, like hail.
The teddybear gives me warmth and light and quiet.
The teddybear cannot speak.
The teddybear looks at me.
The teddybear touches me.
The teddybear is so unbelievably close to me.
The teddybear keeps me warm.
Warmth gives comfort. The calm gives trust.
The teddybear is the sun.
I know what the teddybear says, the teddybear who cannot speak, speaks. He speaks the whole time without speaking. He always says that what feels good and what makes me happy.
Martin Gelland
Imagine being born somewhere, a place that becomes your country, in a sense your identity, but not totally, since you are a citizen of the universe, but still a place where you feel you belong … most of the time. Then one not so sunny day, you decide to leave your country for a new one, a new place where you hope you will also belong. For many years you feel you have succeeded in belonging to both places, and then one day you wake up and realize too much has changed in you and your original home is no longer a place where you belong anymore. Could you ever go back to live there? It seems like an overwhelming challenge … maybe you could grow old there. But no, you are already old, so that won’t work either. As you try to move forward, the next day you wake up and realize that you belong less and less in your new country, which now and for some time has stopped being new. You are a man without a country. You don’t belong anywhere and at first that feeling really sucks. You fight that sensation of sinking and gradually begin to float. It’s not a weightless floating, but still, sometimes it feels pretty good. You can stay here now, grow older, die. And even though you don’t really belong, you have found a niche. Maybe you truly have become someone who only belongs in one place … the universe.
I’m Cecilia Gelland, violinist in Duo Gelland. I travel a lot. There is not only one place I call home. My cell phone corrects and suggests in three languages, and always the wrong one. My closest friends live in different countries. Some of them I only meet once in a decade, yet the feeling of belonging pervades every thought and feeling I have about them. When I am in my northern home there’s always a picknick with the neighbours, sometimes one every day! The feeling of belonging comes as no surprise then.
But sometimes I feel that I belong at most unexpected moments, alone, far from home. Like when I look through the rainy train window at houses, fields, forests, and water swooshing by while I try to imagine living in that neighbourhood or that one… And suddenly I do feel that I belong, not to a particular place but to every place. I’m an earthling. It overcomes me with such strength, warmth, care and love that I tear up.
18 år. På ishockeyplanen med vingliga skridskor. Vad gör jag här?
Pucken kommer, äsch, jag missade den.
”Nästa gång tar du den, passa till Alexandra!” Ropar någon.
De vill ha mig med! Killarna i klassen vill ha MIG med!
Jag vågar nästan inte tro att det är sant. Fantastiska känsla, första gången jag känner ”vi”.
Pucken kommer, jag missar, men det gör ingenting.