Prentis Hemphill: Longing, Belonging & Love

The Common Good podcast is a conversation about the significance of place, eliminating economic isolation and the structure of belonging. In this episode, Joey Taylor and Sarah Buffie speak with Prentis Hemphill.

Sarah Buffie is the visionary founding director of Soul Bird Consulting ,which believes that nothing has the power to heal like supportive relationships. Specializing in trauma responsive care, Sarah helps organizations and individuals disrupt current models of thinking by building empathy and understanding around the effects of trauma. 

Prentis Hemphill is a writer, embodiment facilitator, political organizer, and therapist. They are the founder and director of The Embodiment Institute and the Black Embodiment Initiative, the host of the acclaimed podcast, Finding Our Way, and author of the book, What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World.

The poem shared was You Must Be Present by Jose Olivarez.

This episode was produced by Joey Taylor and the music is from Jeff Gorman. You can find more information about the Common Good Collective here. Common Good Podcast is a production of Bespoken Live & Common Change. 

Transcript

Sarah: Thanks Prentis for being here with us.  struck me in the beginning part of your book when you talked about trauma and healing and the  importance of visioning and longing and how impactful that is and I've been curious since reading what is the longing or dream that has emerged for you as you've continued through your own healing journey?

Prentis: A lot of my longing is around my relationship with my child. I have bigger ones for the world too that I can talk about, but there's an ongoing longing to be available for connection and intimacy with my child. And that keeps pulling me forward into a whole lot of tricky internal terrain. When I think that I have it figured out or something figured out, I'm like, oh, there's this other whole level to that. So I think I have this longing for A real intimate yet spacious connection with my child. And I think for the world, kind of stirring in me in this moment is how do we stay present for this moment and for the moments that are going to unfold? It's kind of like a question and it's kind of like a longing in that it guides me in how I do my work. But  I keep saying that I think a lot of us are For a lot of reasons, both designed and historical in our most reactive selves and that is  probably the least helpful for the crises that we're facing. And I'm really in a longing about, what are the rituals, what are the practices? What is it that we need to be creating right now that tends to that aspect? How do we become grounded even when the ground is shifting so quickly and so dramatically underneath us?

Sarah: Wow. Yeah, absolutely. And both really connect. I think  where we're at right now in the world and parenting, I'm nine months pregnant going on 15 months ready to send that eviction notice to the old.  Yeah. And that struck me too, in listening to your book, just the love you have for your child and how that opened up your heart in just a new way. So I, Got emotional about that knowing it's, it's coming, you know. Yeah. 

Prentis: Oh, that's so special. 

Sarah: Yeah. So it really moves me to hear you talk about presence, not just for where we are in this moment, but relating that back to your really intimate experiences and how you cultivate that and remember that \ with your child and your family to really center that, because that's going to have the ripple effect  to the macro.  How do you balance what you're being called towards in your professional work and your personal life? 

Prentis: With a lot of practice, honestly, I mean, I, feel like my days are kind of dedicated to practice. I have work to do and I think that's sort of where my calling ends up, you know, there's this administrative piece of your calling where it's like you have a calling and you want to do it, but then you have to like build things and coordinate things and schedule things and  that part is probably my least favorite aspect of anything. But I really try to build my days somewhat around practice and listening to myself. When am I feeling my most creative? When am I feeling my most relational? How do I like to relate? How do I not like to relate? What time do I go to bed? What do I eat? That is,  at least at this point, and I know this isn't true for a lot of people in this moment in the world, I have some semblance of control over those routines and those practices in my day. So I'm like, while I have this, I'm going to be as intentional as I can about my practice, and I've tried to practice in a way that cultivates presence. I move in a way that cultivates presence. I sleep in a way that cultivates presence. That's what I try to do. And of course I get knocked off. We all get knocked off on our paths. But that's where I put my attention. And that helps me when  my kid this morning is getting ready or when she comes home from school later on to know how to actually be with her and spend time with her and listen to her and be curious about her.  it gives me more of the capacity to do that  in my work too. So yeah, practice is always kind of the answer for me. Practice. 

Sarah: You wrote a poem recently about I'm no longer saving the world, I'm savoring it. Where did that arise for you? Because it's coming up right now as I'm hearing you talk, I wonder if your parenting journey has impacted. Yeah. 

Prentis: That phrase actually came to me. What it was, was the poem started with  no longer saving the world. I savor it. And that came to me like a year or so ago, I was coming out of a dream. And that phrase was just with me  I said it to my friend and I think she was kind of taken aback. Like, you're not trying to save the world anymore. Like that's what we're doing or saving the world. And it's not exactly that I'm not interested. I am very interested in the worlds that we build and how we build them. But I, think if we go about trying to save some world without savoring it. What we lose, what we forget to honor, what we forget to bring along what we don't realize we need to become for it. I think all of that gets lost. So it is sort of a shift in my life and the season of my life, the age that I am, my parenting, where it does feel like a priority to savor, which to me is present. How do I drop deeply into my life, into the moment, into connection. And, you know, as much as I can not try to get out of there, not trying to be four places at once. And there's a lot of pressure to be four places at once, but as much as I can, how do I drop into presence? And I think that actually serves our saving of the world in ways that we don't quite articulate. 

Sarah: one thing I thought was really beautiful about what you wrote. Sometimes folks, when they're so into the collective, there's a pendulum sweep back to the individual. Like, I have to protect myself or go insular. The way you wrote,  you had so much capacity for the other,  even by centering savoring versus saving and I thought that was really profound. So,  thank you. Yeah. Yeah, I appreciate that.

Joey: So when Sarah and I were speaking about this conversation, we were thinking about these two big domains of longing and um, Um,  I know that's probably not an incredibly novel framing for you, but it does strike me that one is embedded within the other. The element of belonging for me that you write so specifically about is this part of personal agency and how it's a personal choice. Could you just speak about that a little bit? What is our role in choosing belonging for ourselves?

Prentis: It's a great question actually, because I'm maybe working on another project that moves in on these questions a bit. So it's both like, All I'm thinking about and all that I'm unclear about at the same time. So I'll just share some of the things that are stirring in me right now. I'll answer the second part of the question, then I'll come back to the longing and belonging piece too, is there's this binary thing that I think sometimes happens in our world where, the collective, as you were talking about, Sarah, and the individual and individualism kind of to the extreme. But there's this tension that I think happens where we don't know really how to talk about, often, both the existence of the individual and the real existence of the collective. And it ends up almost being kind of like politicized in a way, like this side or the left in particular, where I'm sort of rooted is interested in the collective. And then the right is sort of bootstraps individual. And that's a gross  I know, but it's also, I think some of the ways that we struggle to resolve what feels like attention. But I don't think necessarily has to be. And I felt like it was a risk in my own work and in my own teaching to talk about the individual as the site  of choice and that the individual can choose. I mean, you can get into all kinds of conversations about free will and all that and consciousness, but leaving that aside, I will say that there is a point at which we are absolutely created by relationships and context, and there is something that we might call will that lives in the interior of what we call a person. And so I can make a choice to move towards something or not. It does mean that I need to be resourced in order to make that choice. But there's something about that will. Now, I think we could even  keep zooming in on the microscopic level, looking at will and being like, maybe even emergence of will and choice, you know, again, has to be resource or it lives in the collective. And I think all of that is true. You know, I was talking to a friend yesterday that like, healing requires a surrender. And that is the one move that is actually really difficult for a teacher, facilitator, anybody to teach you. To surrender, to let your body foreground, to let the sensations, the impulses of your body, for example, as an embodiment teacher foreground, people will do all kinds of things to resist that, to intellectualize it, to do everything, to just let their body move in the lead. And that requires a surrender of something. And I can talk about surrender. I can sort of point to it and, do all these things to show you this is where the surrender could go, but I can't make anybody fall back. Then that's something that has to be allowed by something that we call the self. So there's that piece. I'm really interested in the interior  and this will piece I think is necessary and sometimes missing actually from the conversations that I've been in around healing and social context. The longing and belonging piece, I think I've been writing a lot about how unfortunately in a way for me, belonging and the experience of belonging requires me to feel my longing for the other. And sometimes it feels uncomfortable. That's why I say, unfortunately, I'm like, Oh I have to like open myself to the aching sense. That I need you, I need somebody, and that's a very vulnerable thing. It's a raw thing but I think it's a thing that allows us to step into belonging, to enter belonging with a fuller appreciation of what it is, with more presence. So I think longing and belonging go together in that way for me. It's like, we almost trick ourselves out of believing that we need each other. And how do we tap back into the longing that actually allows and catalyzes? the belonging in the world.

Joey: Sarah, say  the quote that you said right before we started. 

Sarah: You said Prentice, the child of individualism is isolation. 

Joey: For me, it does feel like the antidote to isolation is, At least a part of it is being connected to our longing for one another. 

Prentis: I think that's right. But it's  a hard medicine. I mean, I'm in this whole year of experimentation because this one really hits home for me, like isolation. And we can put all the attachment theory on top of it, void and attacher right here. All these things  that I'm really trying to turn and face in myself and I think a culture of individualism, a culture that says, everybody has to make their own way, but also it kind of requires that we pretend like we made it anywhere by ourselves. But eventually, the edge of that philosophy, the edge of that is all these isolated people that deny their need for each other, that deny their  interconnection, interconnection, and we see the ramifications that that can have in the world. This is the question that I'm in is like we say the answer is connection community, but it's really hard to go from isolation to community, and we can have a lot of platitudes and nice words about it. But what is it that is that leap from isolation to connection. And that's what I'm really, really curious about because it's not just like, Oh yeah, I need to be connected to people. There's so much terror in that. There's so much vulnerability. There's so much risk. And I'm really curious about how we traverse that terrain, having gone from being isolated and vulnerable in a different way, realizing the vulnerability of an isolated position, which we can deny through all our defenses, but when we wake up to like, Oh, I'm isolated, that means I'm vulnerable to this many things. How do I Turn towards the other and and leave myself open to the mystery that is relationship. I mean, The encounter with the other is representative of the mystery of the whole thing. You don't know what's going to happen. You don't know how you're going to feel. You don't know what they're going to say. You don't know if they can address the longing that you have. You don't know. And yet you choose to enter into that space of the unknown with another and figure out how to dance. So I think it's a really profound question. It's one that's sending me on a journey right now of like, how do we actually move through that space? And I don't have the answer. I just have a lot of questions.  

Joey: have this,  maybe it's a little confessional perhaps. I've heard you talk about the cultivation of absolute unshakable belonging 

Prentis: did I say that? 

Joey: You did. You did. 

Prentis: Oh gosh. Okay. 

Joey: And it feels like the construction of belonging that you are presenting is there's a plurality of sources that could offer this belonging to us. And I'm always drawn by the idea of other things offering belonging besides people. And I think maybe the confessional piece is here because that feels much more risky, you say this piece about the earth is offering belonging,  you're saying places where you find joy with your family, like experiences, dancing, singing, offer belonging. But to be totally honest, when I'm in those places, I feel joy, but the aesthetic affective, Markers of belonging.  That feels unique from that relational belonging piece. Do you see a distinction between those different sorts of belonging and Am I somehow bypassing to look for belonging in nature and not in my relationships?  

Prentis: Well, I can't answer that for you. I think you're telling on yourself a little bit, but I do think there are different spheres and different levels of belonging. I would say for me as a Southerner, as a black Southerner It has been very fraught for me to belong with nature. Someone living in the south, and living actually where my house is located, used to be part of a really large plantation system. It was like 36, 000 acres here in this area. And now it's a town, but It is fraught at times for me to consider what it means to belong to this place. And I feel very much from the South. I'm of the South. I'm from the South. I grew up eating Southern food, Southern music, blues, country, all that is what I grew up on. And yet there's always been a tenuous relationship where I feel both of this place and rejected by this place. So it's very confrontational for me  at times to belong with nature, which meant that to belong here, there's so much grief I have to feel. There's been so many tears shed just living here and imagining what my ancestors experienced on this land. And it's also opened me up to my ancestors experienced joy, love, pain, all of these things and remembering that it's not the land that did it and that there's a mythology that sits on top of the land and how do I move through that to get to relationship with place?  it's complex and I think wherever we turn for connection there's both the opportunity for  the belonging and grief and all of it to show because I think that is the nature of relationship. I think all of that emerges in every site. And I, I think joy, this is an interesting question. This is also a place where probably my confessional piece is  I feel underdeveloped around joy, so I'm like, does joy simulate a sense of belonging for me? I mean it does, that like ecstatic sense of belonging to the big allness, wholeness   thing. I do feel that when I dance but I think it's like belonging to what? I do feel like in those moments I belong to the all. I belong to the flow of human life. I belong to the expression that we have. I belong there, but belonging with human beings day to day is a different sort of belonging. So I think there's different levels, different ways of belonging. But I think each way has its own confrontation that we have to face that changes us fundamentally. And we do that when we're resourced to do it. I reconnected with nature when I felt resourced to do that and not before. 

Prentis: I say to myself, when the what wears all up in the how now. Trees. I turn to the trees for relief and they say, nah, don't look at us. You don't even know our names. You don't even know the difference between an oak tree and a maple tree. It's true.  My relationship with love, nature, money, fill in the blank, is like my relationship to weather.  I only see it when it's pouring on my head.  I'm sorry to the trees I grew up with, I didn't ask, I never learned, or even wondered about their names, their families, their longings. I only dreamed of me climbing onto their shoulders.  Honestly, I was a ladybug to them,  only heavier and more annoying.  Those trees I grew up with were generations older than me.  They were practiced at living in a way I will never understand, and all I could imagine was a view from their crown.  Oak trees.  They were oak trees with their own history of migration.  Rooted in Calumet City, like me.  If I asked them for answers, I wouldn't have understood.  Sunlight. Water. Sunlight. Water. Sunlight.  Water.

Prentis: Well, It makes me think of the pecan tree that was my best friend growing up, and, It rained down pecans on my house and I never liked pecans when I was a kid. I taught myself to like them when I was an adult, but I loved that pecan tree. And I croaked up against my house and would shake my house. And we had so many pecans and make pecan pies and gave them away. And then My dad's house was condemned essentially. That house that I grew up in they said no one could live there anymore, and they bulldozed it and built another house, which was a whole scam that I won't get into. They stole a bunch of black people's houses in my town, but they bulldozed the house and the tree. And when I came back, I said to my dad, I was like, where'd the tree go? You know, it's like, That was my favorite thing. And he showed me that it was regrowing itself. You know, there were some sprouts coming up. So appreciated that. But it made me think of that,  the trees that we rely on that are stability, even when we don't take the time to know them. They're still there.

Joey: What's the the promise of healing  in that pecan tree for you as you think about it now. 

Prentis: Like what was the promise of healing from? Yeah. 

Joey: Yeah. Like, how are you metabolizing that rebirth?

Prentis: Yeah, I mean, it felt like a brutality that it was bulldozed but it feels like a persistent kind of, it's beyond strength, it's a different kind of presence that it's emerging again, and I probably won't see it  grow to the height that it was. At that time it was an big old tree but to get to see it begin again,  there's resilience in that there's persistence in that. And there's a reverence for what doesn't move on our time.

Sarah: Again, I'm struck by how you talk about love and how we do or do not center love, and a colleague of mine talks about that a lot in our trainings, working with folks with disabilities and mental health labels and complex trauma histories that rarely do we hear the word love in our work and it's part of our mission to bring that to the forefront. So I appreciate how you talk about that, but where's love leading you  as you step into, you said you've got new writings, new musings, new curiosities. How does love land for you at the forefront? 

Prentis: Well, I thought I was going to write a book about love next, but then my friend is writing a book about love.  So I thought, Well, I guess I'll give it to her. it's like inspiration. You gotta be open to it and ready to move. And so I think she'll do a great job on it. I'm leaving that be. But it's always sort of folded in there for me. I mean, love to me right now is just a willingness to change. Like, I think love is like  that light that compels us to evolve. And I feel really open to that right now.  I'm just going to change right now. I'm just going to change. I'm just going to open. I'm just going to be more available, even as, you know, for me and I think a lot of us.  It feels like some lights are dimming. I'm going to keep being available to light. I'm going to keep being available to connection. I'm going to keep having faith in that transformative power of love, the love that you know, James Baldwin talks about, it grows us up. And I think that's a lot of the challenge of our times. A lot of us are like if I put it gently underdeveloped in a lot of emotional and spiritual ways. Myself included and I think love is all that has ever developed me. Love is all that has ever grown me up and I'm going to keep loving. I'm going to keep loving so that I keep growing. I'm going to keep loving so that I provide a light in which others can grow. And try to do love's work. Do love's bidding as much as I can. 

Joey: I am so incredibly compelled, similar to that pecan tree by the fact that it doesn't grow.  our effort or with our agency. So while we do have agency, while we do have will  you're still a recipient of this love. I'm a recipient of this love that's growing me up. And there's something there that gives me faith and hope as I look at the world. 

Prentis: I feel grateful to be the recipient of love. And I, I also feel like what's the work that makes us good recipients of love? Or,  I was saying, available. That it's not just that love is bestowed on me and kind of exists around me, but that I let it seep into my pores and into my system. That I let it change me. That I let it reveal myself to me, that I let it compel me towards reciprocity and generosity, I think sometimes a lot of us can have love that's kind of around us, we don't let it in. We don't let it really, really in. And we don't, I think part of letting it in, understanding the magic of that. There are other beings that are colluding with your life, with your existence. The trees even, like the fact that they set up this whole system with us so we could breathe. Do we honor that we have that pact with the trees? They're colluding with us for our living. And if we lived with some kind of honor, some kind of respect for that, some love for that, even, man, it would change so many things. So I really want to be, And I invite others on this journey. I really want to be more of a good recipient of the love that's around me cause there is love around me and I don't, I don't want to block it. 

Joey: One of the people that Sarah and I love is named Troy and he wrote this question for you.  You've described boundaries as the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously. What are some grounded, healthy ways you've seen people set these boundaries, especially in an emotionally charged context, like children cutting off parents or friends severing ties? How might we prepare others to receive these boundaries non violently, so the process doesn't perpetuate further harm or trauma?

Prentis: I really think the point of boundaries is our intactness and it's not so much that we kind of fixate on the boundary itself and how to articulate the boundary and what do I do with the boundary and is this a good boundary or bad boundary, but the point is our intactness. A boundary conveys what keeps you intact and  first have to cultivate and respect your own intactness. I think about it in a bodily way. I talk about boundaries like a bodily integrity. If I cultivate presence, centeredness, however you might think about it, my boundaries are what  keep me open, keep me curious, keep me available for connection. That's what a boundary does. A boundary is not about just protecting me from impact at all costs. A boundary is what keeps me in my bodily integrity. So first, in a way we have to cultivate that or centrally, I'll say, we have to cultivate that sense of intactness and then your boundaries sort of naturally arise out of that.

Sarah: It's a twist on what we usually understand as boundaries as you know, like we're blocking keep out or keep myself, even though our physical shoulders might come up and protect our internal organs, right? I love that notion of boundaries keep me open. Boundaries keep me curious, It's like how easy and free bowling with bumpers are. You know what I mean? Like, I can just be me out here, you know? Like, yeah, it's very generous.

Prentis: I mean, I thought I had great boundaries for a long time, but I really had great walls, so. 

Sarah: Ah, yeah, exactly, yeah.  Colleague, another person we love, LaShonda Suggs, she talks about boundaries and how do we live full into our boundary. Not just here's my boundary, but how do I live into it? And I've, my wife and I joke with the fetus all the time. We're, you know, We're always you know,  projecting things and making things up, kind of joking and stuff. And one of our  second ultrasounds the last picture is her little hand just flipping us off and we're like, okay, but, but just how proud we are that she's like going to live into her fullness, you know, and we make that up right now for her.

Prentis: I love that. I will say about parenting, if I could just offer one thing that I learned along the way, it's like,  They are there. When they arrive, they are there. Wow. And the more you listen to them, the more it's teaching them about their bodily integrity.  For myself, if your parents weren't attuned and weren't listening, you would learn to abandon that reaching, that communication, that expression, you'd abandon certain aspects of yourself to just Accept the conditions, but when you listen to them right from the start, I think it allows them to fully, you know, you're talking about living into that space. I think it allows that. So yeah, just that they're there. They're going to be there. 

Sarah: Yes. We've talked about a lot that it was tease about the projection, but that we can't get wait to get to know this person and learn this person. And Gabor Maté talks about that tension between authenticity and attachment.  These are the two needs we have. And is exactly what you're saying. If my parents need me to be someone that I'm not, my need for attachment will override my need for authenticity. And then I'm 20 years old. Who the hell am I? Right. So, yeah, that's, that's a, that's a great  a great reminder. 

Joey: So I, I have a three year old and a six year old and I have a 

Prentis: three year old. My condolences  on your sleep. I love it. 

Joey: Um, Yeah, so I heard you say that, when we're born, there's all these competing visions for our lives that are put on us. And maybe this isn't a parenting question. Maybe this is a personal question, but what does it look like to cultivate the capacity to listen to our own,  Or what does it look like to cultivate the capacity for us to listen to the lungs of our children? How do we make space for that so that we're not just muddied up by the competing visions that are put upon us?

Prentis: There's my child's wants.  There's my child's longing. My child wants a lot of different things. Mostly like, I want you to bring me water and crackers right now. I want to watch Lion King. But listening to their longings is really a different exercise in  spaciousness and listening underneath. Especially with a child it's almost like, reading poetry. I feel like the words they say, when they say them, you have to listen in a different way to be like, Oh, this is what you're trying to say, or this is what you're processing. This is what you're remembering. So  really settling back in myself and opening up and listening to my child kind of across  time and space so that I can understand what it is that she's conveying so I can witness what she seems to be drawn to. She teaches me a lot about listening because it's not just about the words.  She's into this whole thing right now where yesterday I said, how was your day? She said, how I'm telling you with my mind.  Okay. All right. Teach me to listen to you that way. Listening to our   longings. I think for a lot of us that are adult at this point,  it kind of goes back to an earlier place that we read it. I think we can't underestimate how much grief we have to feel and feeling into that space between Oh, this is a longing imposed. This was my discomfort or my inability or unwillingness to live into that longing. This is the grief of that expectation being imposed on me. And then maybe underneath there, there's something of like, this is the voice that I've quieted. This is the longing that I've quieted that has maybe felt like a distraction or a diversion, but it's actually the thing that is calling me forward. And I think a lot of us relate to our gifts that way. It's like, Oh, that's the thing that I do that keeps me from doing the thing I'm supposed to do.  Sometimes it was for me, I was like, Oh, this way that I get into all of this philosophical stuff is just like keeping me from doing my assignment on time. And not like the thing that I do  authentically and uniquely. you know, I was a terrible student. I was a really bad student. Growing up,  I made straight A's with little effort. I will say to be transparent about that. But when I got to college, I couldn't do it. I was like, barely made it through there. I eked my way through there, and I didn't feel like there had been a listening to myself or anybody else had listened to me. Like, what do you want to do? What are you gifted in? So I was running around trying to please other people and failing. all the time. So once I exited from self blame and being like, oh, you're just terrible, shitty student, you're a disgrace, all these things. Then I was able to enter into something else of like, you've been trying to express and do something else and you didn't have the resource to actually cultivate that and honor that.  I think grieving, parsing through  all of that is when we get in touch with what's the thing that makes me tremble to say it? What's the thing that I'm a little bit afraid to admit? is what I long for. I think a lot of our longings are buried underneath a tremble and a fear of not belonging, of being sent away, not being good enough. I think a lot of our deepest longings are sitting underneath a lot of that. 

Prentis: I'm in a lot of reflection about the way that belonging can be exploited and used because of how basic a need it is, because of how primal or central it is for us. It's like the promise of belonging, the threat of excommunication, all these things can really scare us into doing a lot of actions that may not otherwise be aligned with what we believe or value in the world. And I think that's something for all of us to kind of sit with in this moment. Because one of the things for me, I think I wrote in the book that courage to me is risking safety, belonging, and dignity for the sake of something bigger. And safety, belonging, and dignity are the things that get ruptured with trauma, but courage to me the action of risking some of those things. because of a bigger, in a way, belonging that we see, that we sense in the world. I think sometimes we get ushered into  small sameness kind of belonging. We get threatened into belonging. need to belong gets co opted a smallness. And I think courage is required to open belonging back up we, in a way, misunderstand belonging. We think that someone can tell us what it is that we need to be in order to belong rather than all of us revering  the diversity of creation and then building society's ways of being based on the truth of who's here. You know, we're looking at people and LA Fires have been thinking about disabled folks that were left in their homes they live next door to people because they didn't think about them or didn't have time. A community in a way, like my neighbors, I'm looking at one of their homes. It's like, how do I build my community and my set of relations based on the people that are here and what they offer and bring. And how do I honor that? So I know what you need. I know where you are. I know what I can offer. I know what you offered to me. Responding to what is and building based on that, rather than trying to control human expression and narrow it. To the point that we can control it and use it and manipulate it.  because we need belonging, we get easily not just tricked though, sometimes tricked, coerced threatened into, into those positions. And I really hope that we can keep reaching for a belonging that is beyond what we see that requires courage to reach it.