On Moving And Belonging Somewhere

“You pass through places and places pass through you
But you carry ‘em with you
On the soles of your travelin’ shoes…
I got the wanderin’ blues
And I’m gonna quit these ramblin’ ways
One of these days, soon.”

– The Be Good Tanyas, “The Littlest Birds”

Jesus replied, “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay His head.”

– The Life of Jesus according to Luke, 9:58

I moved yesterday – the first of two moves this fall. I left the house I’ve lived in for two years and piled my boxed belongings into a tiny apartment on the fringe of Searcy. Then I moved myself into a mansion on a hilltop where I’m to look after a cat. The cat is shy and will hide from me for the first couple of days, so it’s been pretty effortless so far.

I don’t like moving, but it’s for different reasons than one might think.

What I don’t like very much is boxing things half of which I ought to throw away but am too attached to, carrying boxes to the car trying not to lose anything loose I placed on top in a moment of rash folly, driving through town with so many boxes in the back seat that the driver’s seat has to be all the way up and I can’t put my legs anywhere, unloading the car at the new place wondering very much how I got everything into the car in the first place, clambering up the stairs practically blind and halfway afraid of falling back down them because there’s a box between my eyes and the steps I can’t see and steps have this annoying habit of moving secretly when you’re not looking, and then putting the boxes down in a way that will still make sense to me if and when I decide to unpack them later. All of it in one hundred degree heat with a car lacking a working a/c.

But I don’t think anyone likes that part.

I was talking about this move to a friend, and she surprised me by asking whether I grieved about leaving my old house. She had just learned a lot about the psychology of grieving and I think she was hoping to find people whose sadness she could sagely comment on. Or perhaps she genuinely cared, though she had a decidedly pixyish glint in her eyes when she asked. Probably both. She’s a good girl.

(Sidenote: Some people really love finding the aggrieved. Another friend of mine lost her mother last year and she says at first she was really glad everyone wanted to comfort her. But after a while she noticed that some people find an eerie pleasure in hearing about how badly bereft people hurt, and they won’t leave the mourner alone. She said it was almost like they were stealing her grief – not to alleviate it, but because they found it satisfying. People are odd.)

As I wasn’t feeling the least bit bereft, I’m afraid I disappointed my friend who asked about grieving.

“Grieve?” I asked. “Why would I grieve about moving out of my house?”

I was imagining myself weeping uncontrollably into a handkerchief at the sight of my emptied living room.

“Well, you really like that house,” she said. Which is true. It has old wood floors and lots of windows and is in walking distance to campus and to my favorite coffee shop. “I just thought you might feel a little sad about leaving it.”

I thought about that for a while. It’s true that I’m not very good about telling people good-bye when I leave, for example. I try to keep partings as nonchalant as possible. So I wondered. But that’s really because I care for the people, not because the move from the place where we both stand bothers me. Even if the place is nice.

“But don’t you want to belong somewhere?” the same friend’s older sister asked me when I told her about the conversation. She’s from Georgia. She couldn’t stand to be away from the Peach State, so she moved back to be close to home when she graduated from college in Abilene. She even told me that she’d only visited Searcy a few times, but she already felt kind of attached to it. I asked her why.

“Because it’s such a neat place,” she said. Now there are some neat places I’d like to live: Close to exciting cities, by the sea, in the mountains, even in some small towns with character (like Franklin, Tenn. or Charlottesville, Va. – if it has to be in the U.S. and in the South.) But Searcy?

“It’s not that,” the girl from Georgia cried. “Don’t you want to belong somewhere?”

I thought a while about that, too. I thought about saying something clever like, “No, but I’d like to belong to someone…” because people are so much more important than places, but saying that would’ve been a lie, too. I don’t believe in being owned. Not by a place. Not by a culture. Not by a school or group. Not by a person. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, one of my favorite writers, puts it this way: “What causes suffering is a sense of ownership, which is love’s opposite.” And what I want from life isn’t to cause suffering or to suffer, isn’t to own things or to be owned. I want to be alive – which means: to love life, to love people – even, I guess, to love places. But love is a thing that is itself alive, and it cannot be in dead things. So I root myself in people, not in towns. I live, and I move. People live, and people move. Towns don’t.

“Well,” my friend said. “I guess my roots are more important to me. And I love Georgia. Georgia’s cool.”

Well, I said not wanting to sound like I’m a drifter or something, so is Berlin. In fact, I think Berlin is the most liveable city in Europe by a long shot if you know what you’re doing while you’re there. But the places I’ve lived are so far apart and so different – Berlin, the Zambian bush, Searcy, soon Chicago – that my roots stretch so far I’d crack if they were sunk deeply in one place.

Let me give an example of how I do love a place.

When I flew in over Berlin last Christmas, it had just rained. So when I looked out of the airplane window onto the sprawling city with its terra cotta roofs and tree-lined avenues and yellow lights, I noticed how familiar the muted wet shade of the daylight seemed. Berlin is a city of parks. In winter, the trees stretched their leafless brown branches up into the cloud-covered sky we were flying across, and I could see the dark green lawns in the parks, but also the deep chocolate brown color of the soil where the trees wouldn’t let grass grow. It was this brown that changed the light, that in spite of the obvious cold made it feel like the city had been built on the warm, earthy fur of the hibernating brown bear for which it is named. Its familiarity made the very daylight feel so like home that for a moment it wrenched my insides.

“See,” my friend said. “That’s because your roots are there. You miss it.”

But I disagree. Missing something is sadness about losing something familiar. But the feeling I’m talking about isn’t sad. It’s a sudden joyful recognition that makes things seem suddenly, deeply right – and that is totally disarming. It’s the feeling we get when we smell our dad’s cologne in the hallway in the mornings, or a dish we haven’t tasted in years. It’s what makes us smile when we hear a laugh we recognize even though we cannot see the person laughing, or when we hear a lullaby that someone sang to us when we were young and that we had all but forgotten. It’s what makes our spine tingle when we’re talking to someone and suddenly the hidden poetry of the conversation makes what was said unforgettable, and we recall the phrase that sparked that shudder forever. It’s the feeling of warmth when we lie still in bed and hear the raindrops on the window, and it’s the helpless excitement that floods us when we see a small child’s face light up because it has finally understood how to walk. And it’s the exhilarating surprise we feel when we come across someone we hardly know but in whom we recognize something so deeply right and mysteriously familiar that it does away with our hesitations long enough to let us forget we weren’t going to take off whatever it is that makes us bulletproof and for better or for worse fall in love.

These are moments of rediscovery, and they surprise us. It’s the surprise that makes them so meaningful, cloaks them in joy beyond reason, beyond circumstance, and beyond place. They’re not emotional fantasies; they’re what is true.

So because I’ve learned this, I don’t truly miss places. Without people, places are just familiar emptinesses – sometimes beautiful, sometimes our “home,” perhaps, but always leaveable. So it is with Berlin. I grew up there. It is where my mother and brother and one of my grandmothers still live. I like it. A lot. But I don’t feel like I have to move back.

Berlin always was a reluctant home in some ways. My mother is American and my father is German. And while Berlin is open, welcoming and cosmopolitan, it is a distinctly German city – by which I mean to say nothing about Germans, except that like locals anywhere in the world Berliners have an acute sense of who is fully like them and who isn’t. This didn’t strike me as much when I was young because I went to a German-American school that kids from lots of other cultures attended, too. Some of my friends were full Germans, others full Americans or Brits, and some were mixes like I am: a German-Indonesian, a German-French Jew, a German-Persian who grew up in Brazil, and so on. Nearly none of them had grown up living most of the time in the same place. I felt like I was the most Berliner of the lot.

But when I visit Berlin now, the fact that I grew up in an unusually multicultural community becomes clearer. Now, most of the time, who I am to the Berliners is increasingly a matter of convenience. I’m a German when that’s what feels best to them. But at other times – and this happens most often in church, actually – when they disagree with something the U.S. does, or when my siblings and I do something that stems from my mother’s American background (like celebrating Thanksgiving), or even when they disagree with me on something and have run out of arguments, then I’m American. One of them. Not one of us.

In the States I am the German.

This leaves me fairly uprooted.

I know it happens to people all the time. In the States it’s being from the North, the South, the West Coast, New England. Or it’s being from Fort Worth rather than Dallas. Or being middle class and white, working class and black, Mexican and illegal. Or being a Church of Christ Christian versus just one of those community church, well, believers.

Nor am I going to pretend that strong roots are unimportant. They are important. It’s good to know where we’re from, because that does influence who we are and how we see things – to a degree. Yet, overvaluing our roots and what group they assign us to means that we value where someone comes from more than we value where the person is going. It means that we’d rather cater to our own comfortable prejudices about how someone will act than about what his actions, thoughts, and words show him to be. And if we’re not careful they lead to false loyalties, to false judgments – and always, always, always to the temptation not to see the other person as someone who is like me and instead to find excuses to see what about the person is unlike me, not worth of me, opposed to me. And that is the root of all kinds of evil, from bullying in schools to overlooking the people who rummage through our trash to chopping up thousands with machetes simply because they’re from the tribe that owns cattle and not from the one that farms.

The danger in overemphasizing what we can’t change about us means, too, that I don’t resent being bicultural. I think of it as a strength because it gives me widened horizons on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the ability to appreciate others for who they are no matter what their horizon is. And that is quite beautiful because it allows me to value people more.

In fact, the person whom I value the most asked me recently whether I think of her as narrow-minded, and later another friend asked me whether I think it would be ok for her to date someone who isn’t as smart as she is.

Here is the answer I gave to both: People who truly have wider horizons (and don’t use them as an excuse to be narrow-minded in turn) learn something truly marvelous. What matters is not where people call home, or how far they’ve traveled, or what all they’ve done in their lives, or even whether they agree with you on everything or can understand everything about you, or grasp everything you say just like you grasp it. It’s really all about the heart. When that’s right, they are whom you want to root in. Those roots can be eternal.

That’s why I’ve learned to be ok with not belonging anywhere. I know whose hearts I share. My family. My friends. Sometimes, my tortured loves. And I know in the only true sense that it is possible to be alive and to be owned, whose I am: God’s. Who needs roots deeper than that?