Belonging

In the midst of a conversation with several friends a few weeks back, my husband said, “I just think people want to be known.” This is something I’ve heard him say before, but one of our friends replied with, “I’ve always thought people just want to be heard.” A few days after this conversation, as I was finishing Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy by the Sea, I read as one of the characters mused, “Everyone needs to feel important.”

                                        Strata No. 6  in a little nook in my studio. 

Whenever I hear a similar idea from multiple places in a short amount of time, I begin to pay attention. I wonder if there’s something for me to learn. I am wondering if there is a throughline in these statements, if they are all just different ways of saying the same thing about a deep longing intrinsic to human nature.

If I were to be pressed to make one of those “I just think everyone wants to…” statements, I would probably finish it with “belong.” I wonder if, deep down, we all want to belong to someone else or to a group. And in that belonging those other desires are met: we are heard when we truly belong; we are known when we truly belong; and we feel important when we truly belong. I probably always align these kinds of longings with connection and our desire to belong to others, and I think to God.

Anyways, this is what I’m pondering these days while I paint in the studio. When I paint, I’m usually thinking about color and shape and line and how they are informing one another on the canvas. But I am also thinking about these other things, these things that make us human. And I know these things are woven into my paintings as well. I am at the place in life where I have more questions than answers, but this no longer scares me. And I am also more sure of some things that I once doubted. I do not take it for granted that I spend my days in a practice that allows me to have space to wonder and explore the questions.