Hi Reader,

My calling is: people experience the deep peace of coming home to themselves right this moment, whatever the circumstances.

Back when I was workshopping that language (actually that work is ongoing) one of the things I started with before landing on "coming home" was "belonging."

I don't remember why that got dropped, but it visited me again this morning and I want to look at it from a few perspectives that increase in ridiculousness as we go.

First, the one I couldn't do on my own: the etymology.

This surprised me, but "belong" doesn't have any Greek or Latin roots. It's from Middle and Old English. The prefix "be-" indicates proximity or attachment, and the verb "longen" means "to go" or "to be fitting or suitable."

The Old English version of the verb, "langian," meant "to go along with."

It seems the original meaning of the word, from about 700 years ago, was "to go along with, properly relate to," while the current more-common meaning of "be the property of, be a member of" appeared about 100 years later.

Of course, in relation to my calling I mean something more like the first one. So this is a 700-year-old linguistic deep cut.

It isn't about fitting in. It's about, well... being home. Being ok, you know, right this moment, whatever the circumstances.

(Of course, the temptation to "fit in" is always there, and I do notice myself feeling the lack of a community who "gets me." But this, I think, is something like a lower-order want. The belonging I deeply desire, which seems like an important prerequisite for belonging with/to others, is belonging to myself. To come home. To be at peace. At one with this moment.)

So maybe the reason I originally dropped the word is because it's been giving sort of the wrong impression for 600 years. It isn't what I was looking for. "Belonging" didn't belong, heh.

The next most (least?) ridiculous idea of belonging looked like this in my head: "be-longing," as in, to "be longing" for something. Because for me there is that kind of... almost wistfulness about the word. It feels aimed at finding something that's been missing. Like, the very idea of belonging seems like it must be based on the sense that I was once one with something and somehow no longer am.

In that sense, it does feel like a fit for my calling. "Coming home" was derived from my deepest moments of inspiration. Through my calling I am "longing" for my ideal, which I have (and this is poetical language) both experienced and not-experienced in this life.

From there, it gets ridiculous quickly. (Requickulous?) Silly, even. The next idea is "be long," as in "not short."

That, too, is kind of a fit. We don't think of trees as "long" but as "tall," though there is a kind of logic to calling them "long." I bring up trees because they embody an aspect of being home, in that they're deeply rooted to the earth, and they aren't moving. Trees that are thriving are experiencing, very literally, that deep peace I mention in my calling. A healthy tree may reach down into the earth as deeply as it stretches toward the sky.

So this sillier sense of "long" echoes "deep" for me, and that, too, is related to my calling. "Coming home" requires one to plumb their own depths, to stretch both for the ground of their being as well as the heights of their experience. Both extreme pleasure and pain can feel like peak experiences, pulling us away from being present. But looked at in another way, the heights of pleasure and pain that we may experience must, like a tree's roots, be mirrored by a depth of our being that is ever-present—ever-present but not always deeply felt. A tree that is not deeply rooted may easily topple. So it is with us, if we don't "be long."

Well, that was surprisingly touching for me to write. May I discover such silliness more often!

Finally, let's take a card from Jack Handey* and make it absurd: looked at another way, we can take belong as meaning "bel ong."

"Bel" is clearly short for "bella," which means "beautiful" in Italian. Essentially this is the equivalent of saying in English, "beaut."

And since Italian was such a good choice for that first part of the word, let's stick with it: "ong" happens to be Italian for "nongovernmental organization."

So "belong," or "bel ong" could mean a beaut of an NGO.

That's, um. Well, that's something. I'm not sure how it's connected to coming home, but, uh, everything is connected, right? I guess it will remain a mystery.