Perthyn - a deeper way of 'belonging'

One of the things I love about living on this little patch of land is the immersion it offers in the great ceremony of life: watching sunrise and sunsets track across the horizon as the sun pendulums between summer and winter solstice, likewise moonrise and set, the rotation of stars, the cycle of seasons, the come and go of swallows and starlings, the daily journey of the heron between lake and river. There’s a deep comfort in the processions of these imperatives - a grounding in our increasingly troubled world. I can send my roots deep into the clay here, the Ash teaches me how to hold steady and reach arms into the world and let them sway rather than break against the storm gusts of media reports and daily news bulletins.

This is an old way of belonging, though that word doesn’t really hit the meaning - our Welsh word ‘perthyn’ is better, retaining an older remembering of the relationship available between people and place. It means ‘related’ - I am related to this place, the beings of this land are my kin, and I am theirs. This quality of belonging is being lost in our fast paced ever mobile lives, but our bodies and souls remember, and it takes so very little if we remember how, to plant roots in the ground wherever we find ourselves: towns, cities or countryside in the lands of our birth or far away where we’re called.

So, at this equinox I wish you deep roots to hold you soundly, and a relatedness to the animate community of your square mile to nourish you through these challenging times, so that we can each hold the broken spaces in our world with compassion and reverence, and meet each other with deep humanity.