#belongingbook.com

"There is a special quality of stillness in a person who encounters the shadow wholeheartedly. Your body may relax in their company because it understands, in the subtle communications of their presence, that nothing is excluded in themselves, therefore nothing in you can be rejected. Such a person, who has given up guarding against the shadow, who has come to wear their scars with dignity, no longer squirms from discomfort or bristles at suffering. They no longer brace in avoidance of conflict. They carry a deep willingness to dance with the inconstancy of life. They've given up distancing as a strategy, and made vulnerability their ally."

Excerpt from “Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home” by Toko-pa Turner (belongingbook.com)

“We can’t know where we’re going if we don’t know from what we originate. The loss of purpose that so many of us feel in modern times is more than a personal problem, it is a cultural ailment which arises out of what I call the Great Forgetting. Our lives are like the fruit of a heritage seed: Each of the generations that preceded us has contributed to our life’s survival. There is an ancestral momentum which carries us forward when we are in step with it, and to which we are beholden. To hear this momentum, we must turn towards the soul. There, in our dreams, we find the clues to what we love and what our lives long for.”

“Even the simplest of rituals is a way of acknowledging the unseen, the unspoken-about, the holy, which feeds our lives with its inexhaustible generosity. Ritual restores us to one another and to that grander coherence to which we all belong. Devoting your time to a ritual is like tending to a living bridge between the seen and the unseen, keeping that reciprocity alive.”

~ From ‘Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home’ (belongingbook.com) by Toko-pa Turner.

Artwork by Saara Alhopuro - Art & Photography

Feliz Día de los Muertos! ☠️