I have always wondered what belonging must feel like. To feel attachment to a place and people, to rest secure in the permanence of it, to see with clarity into your past and your future. What it feels like to feel seen, accepted, fully understood, one of us, them, whomever. I am growing comfortable with an idea that I will never feel that. This is not my story. My story was written before me. My story is the one of a family that lost connections with its past , was ripped from its land by wars, famine and terror, by the imperative of survival in an inhuman system, by man-made ecological disaster, by personal tragedy, by historical upheavals over which we never had control and finally by sheer desperate longing for a better place. My story is the one of separation and of healing that separation. I don’t think there will be a happy ending at the end , a place I can finally call home. But I hope that there will be acceptance, the reconciliation with the idea of my own spiritual homelessness.