“If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.”-William Stafford
I’ve just returned from three weeks traveling in Mexico with my partner. Back in 2021, I spent several months exploring the country and rooted into the small town of Tepoztlan, where I still have friends.
During both of these journeys, a subtle notion crept into my awareness and brought my attention to some intangible knowing that seemed to emanate out of the land itself, whispering this simple message: “You do not belong here.”
My body felt it immediately upon arrival. I constantly struggled to maintain hydration, as the skin on my fingers and hands began to peel off in some leprous pattern. I felt at any moment that the earth could shudder and shake me off its back. My northern blood felt thin on the tropical Oaxacan coast. I felt like I couldn’t even think straight.
I love Mexico, her people, culture, heritage, and history. I cannot wait to return in several months to work with several dear friends and collaborators with Right to Heal. Yet I am under no illusions, it’s just not my place.
Now, I watch the Cascadian rain pummeling down from slate-gray skies, watering the conifer roots and snow-peaked mountains that hold the valley where I was born. I witness the slow stirrings of springtime, and am reminded of the beloved seasonality that my ancestors knew in their bones. The scent of earthworms and cedar trees, the croak of ravens, and the moist wind all remind me that I am home.
As I contemplate this embodied sense of home, I am left wondering about the essential, corresponding human component of belonging: community.
Recently, my friends Ian MacKenzie, host of The Mythic Masculine Podcast, and John Wolfstone, who co-founded the School of Mythopoetics along with Ian, released their film, Village of Lovers, which I was fortunate enough to see earlier this summer when John rolled through town on a screening tour. On the surface, this documentary focuses on Tamera, a radical “free-love” community based in Portugal. Yet the film is actually an intimate study of a brave and intensely human experiment, whereby people choose to live in a functioning, multigenerational village, where life in all of its forms is welcomed and cherished. Sex is just a side effect.
Village of Lovers strongly affected me, stirring up subtle longings that I’ve felt every time I’ve visited a well functioning intentional community, farm, or land project. I feel a yearning for a quality and depth of life that feels difficult, if not impossible to achieve within the city. And I desire a longitude of relationality that I, and my extended circle of friends rarely have the bandwidth for.