MENTATION:

For those of you who don’t know, Calvin Harris, H.W., M., has put together a two-year course for mentorship. We meet once a week on Wednesdays. For each class, we are given homework in the way of writing a short essay on two given words - what do they mean, what bearing have they had in your life? It is for the purpose of becoming aware, not just of the words, but how they mean different things to different people.

Mentorship Class: Belonging

Definition of “belonging” - be the property of; be a member of.  

I was asked to write a page about the word “belonging” as it relates to my life. It has been a central theme of my life almost from birth. My home life was such that I avoided my mother at all costs. Consequently, even though I have a brother and two sisters, I spent a lot of time alone. But I didn’t mind. I could lay for hours and watch dung bugs and rolly pollies, lost in the smell of grass and rich dark earth. So I was well acquainted with my whole self. So much so, that I remember the very moment when I lost it. I was 11 years old when I woke up one morning enveloped in a very foreign feeling. It was sticky and suffocating. Something deeply heavy hung in the air. I could barely move with the weight of it. A little later in life, I realized that feeling was my very first bout of depression. I think it was a sudden quantum growth moment, because starting then, I became very self-conscious. I lived in self judgments. Years later I looked upon that experience as an archetype – Sleeping beauty pricking her finger and going to sleep. Adam and Eve realizing their nakedness.  

I did not belong in my household, but I never minded because I lived in the STATE of BELONGING. I never felt outside of or lost in life before that day. After that, I didn’t belong anywhere. I had friends I belonged to but it was not enough. I had lovers I belonged to. It was not enough. I even had mentors I belonged to. And still, it was not enough. And all the time before I found The Prosperos, I always silently referred to my new state of being as, “I can’t get back to my earth”. I discovered that alcohol got me closer to my lost state than any thing else. In fact, as many teenagers do, I started smoking and drinking in order to look cool but most of all to BELONG.  

I was eventually led to The Prosperos and as I sat listening to my first seminar, I began to feel all kinds of disturbances from within. Sleeping giants of worthlessness began to awaken and smash against what I was hearing. This was not good. At one point, I thought I was going to be sick. At the end of the seminar, I was frozen. I left there dazed and unable to think.  

Days later, the landscape erupted and the earth came rushing back to me. But this time, she was not alone. She brought a whole bunch of friends - Venus, Mercury, the sun, the solar system, the galaxy, the universe !!!! I waved at my whole self as I exploded past her and deeper into beingness. My terrain was flooded with flashing lights of insight, and the whole of my life to that point was seen as DESIGN, PURPOSE, MEANING. Not a cigarette lifted to my lips was insignificant, nor my journey of innocence and belonging, lost and regained.