I never thought about this until well into my life.
I just belonged.
And when you just belong, the way I do, it's easy to assume everyone else does too. Belonging doesn't feel like something you have. It feels like nothing. Like air.
Then one day I started thinking about how the way I am wouldn't belong in Iran. That much of what I thought, said, did, wanted and dreamed about simply wasn't allowed there. Not just frowned upon. Forbidden. Punished. Some of it even with death.
That made me think further - that if my way of being Human couldn't survive there, then it must mean that this place where I was born, grew up and live - maybe isn't just... a place after all?
That it's something. Something specific. Something that could have been different, and only became what it is because generations before me made it so.
That made me consider whether belonging might also go deeper the other way. Meaning. That people who come here aren't automatically just like me. That they carry their own with them, just as I would have carried mine if I'd travelled the other way.
I think they do.
And that some of them therefore can carry something here that's just as foreign and problematic for this place as what I would have carried down there.
The difference is perhaps just that what I would have brought wouldn't have been allowed to take root. If you understand...
The more I've thought about it, the happier I've become that here is the way here is - and that here isn't like there.
You can of course disagree with that.
And wish that here becomes more like there.
But I'm going to stand rather firm on us preserving what here is, and only carefully adding things that most of us agree make it even better to be here.
It's not my experience that this is how we've thought or acted politically for many decades. Is it?
And it's quite problematic that the covenant generations have had with each other here has been betrayed so carelessly.
Because what Krisztina writes, which I share, isn't nostalgia. It's maintenance. A foundation doesn't take care of itself.
And many only discover where and what they belong to the day they understand where they don't.
❤️🔥🪽
The picture is from my birthday yesterday, after I'd put up the Dannebrog so it waved against God's blue sky.
Again - a deep symbol of all sorts of good in this world that I walk around taking for granted. Free thought. Freedom. Folk. Human. It's the church tower over the treetops and the bells Sunday morning, whether you go in or not. It's morning hymns and the Lord's Prayer, the allotment garden and the coffee on the table, the door that could stand unlocked, the word that held because you had to be able to look your neighbour in the eye again, the belief that tomorrow consistently became better than yesterday. It's a thousand years where someone before us cleared, built, baptised, sang and passed on - and never asked if we wanted it, because they knew we'd understand it when we stood with it.
The cross in the flag alone tells that story. And right now someone is acting as if that story is up for negotiation. Both backwards and forwards.
As if you can renegotiate where we came from, and dismantle where we're going.
