Belonging

Song lyric of the day, from Deb Talan's The Gladdest Thing:


Doesn't each of us have a place where we belong?  Could be a sidewalk crack or a sad song.


The song came up on Pandora this morning at work, and that line caught me.  Everyone can think of a place like that, somewhere they felt at home, at peace.  Elizabeth Goudge, in Green Dolphin Street, referred to it as one's own "special country", as a state of mind given shape as a place.


For me as a child I found it in the branches of a particular tree.  Since then I have found it many places, from the banks of the Teifi in Wales to an empty parking lot, a full auditorium to a dim cedar grove.  They are the places and the moments when I feel I have most truly lived, times and places where doing was not required, when simply being was enough and more than enough and the distortion of life as we know it was gone, when action became superfluous and speech banal.


To live always in those moments would be to live in heaven.