Friday Dispatch: Hefty Bags and Anagrams

Four stages of belonging

Sep 06, 2024

Friday greetings,

I recently attended a workshop about belonging where we learned about and discussed four stages of belonging: being noticed, named, known, and needed. How deeply we as humans need all of these! This week brought reflections on them all.

The epic undertaking of helping my parents pare down the contents of their home of 40 years continues. They’re in the homestretch and will have moved into their new digs just a few weeks from now.

I spent much of yesterday afternoon working with my mom to sort the contents of the two upstairs bathrooms. If you do not do something like this regularly, you’re likely to wind up with quite the collection – hotel shampoos, earplugs, hair combs, lotions and potions of all kinds, makeup you forgot you had, and some expired medications for good measure. Along with plenty of perfectly usable products and first-aid supplies, you might also find yourself sifting through dusty pieces of coral (why, no one knows), old toothbrushes, and an extraordinarily mundane assortment of nail clippers and nose-hair trimmers and topical analgesics sufficient to stock a small pharmacy.

After clearing out the medicine cabinets and bathroom drawers, we inspected the other contents of a couple of closets we hadn’t yet tackled during this six-month-long process, mostly extra sheets and old pillows. Then we called my dad to come upstairs for a “tour” of our progress and I carried the heaviest bags down, sorted by trash, recycling, and donation.

When we got to the last two bags stuffed with bedding, my dad suggested we just throw them down the stairs. His toss went great! Like bowling (except nothing like bowling). He heaved the bag and we watched it bounce down the elegant, curved wooden staircase, built in 1878. That looks satisfying, I thought to myself.

“Your turn,” he said.

I grabbed the second bag and paused briefly for dramatic effect before flinging it with gusto. But I had forgotten to tie it shut, and sheet after folded sheet flew out until the bag bounced with a sad little thud on the floor.

We stood at the top of the stairs howling with laughter.

Make of it what you will, but I’m not sure any metaphor is needed. Honestly, I was just glad for the moment of shared levity amid so much hard work.

How important it is to be needed.

I had a board meeting at our synagogue last night, so I went to town for a burrito instead of going straight home. I sat on the new Amherst Common eating and doing my Hebrew homework, then laid back on a slab of smooth concrete, taking in the September sun, staring up at the blue sky, and letting the physical and emotional efforts of the day seep through me.

When I sat back up, I heard someone call my name. A friend had spotted me and walked over to say hello. She was with her daughter, who will become a bat mitzvah next June. (I remember meeting her for the first time when she was a baby and we were new to the community.) I stood to greet them, and we chatted about kids, life, work, and the world. When I mentioned actively looking toward rabbinical school, she smiled and threw up her arms. “Finally!”

How good it is to be named, noticed, and known.

During a short spiritual grounding exercise I led for my Creative Facilitation Training cohort, we spent 10 minutes exploring our names. I invited everyone to look at the letters our names contain. What might be revealed by letting those letters spill out?

As I said at the beginning of this practice, we all have many names. We have our legal names, which may or may not be the same as the names the world knows us by. Some of us have middle names, former names, Hebrew names, names so intimate they remain unknown even to ourselves, or names yet to be discovered and claimed.

That night, I found that my names carry many things including wear and tear, warts and trash, charts and resets. But the phrase that caught me off guard?

What a vast heart.

Maybe not keeping everything tightly sealed is how we sometimes let our contents spill out, even if accidentally. And maybe moving things around is how we find the wisdom so often hidden in plain sight.

Isn’t this how we become known to ourselves and each other? Isn’t this how we laugh? Isn’t this how we keep going? Isn’t this how we belong?

Shabbat Shalom and love,

Jena

"I am here to show you that the only face you need to bring to life and work in the new year is your own: Tear-streaked, colored by living, grooved, friendly, open, kind. Smile through the tears, love from inside the pain. Smell the earth in its falling, the last flowers blooming, the first snow when it flies. That is the only face you need. No mask is required."