Zugehörigkeitsgefühl

My wanderings this morning have taken me to the shallow landing at the eastern foot of the Kente Portage at Carrying Place. Lemon-bright finches gather in the shrill of the red-winged blackbird; a breeze separates low clouds opening for a lazy sun. Its quiet here; a Manitoba maple leans into the stillness of the Bay of Quinte; over there, four emerald green merganser ducks stream by and beyond, the silhouette of two fisher people ride the horizon.

Zugehörigkeitsgefühl—I learned it this way: tzou geh hoerig kites geh fool; I can’t speak the language, but the word seemed to flow from the tongues of my Germanspeaking friends Jo and Steffie; I asked about it. They were in the midst of helping me purge an amount of stuff from my life and the word encapsulated several meanings. It’s about belonging and prolonging around the matter of belongings, a triple entendre I guess you can say. It came into conversation about how we develop emotional attachment, how we extend memory for better or worse with attachment to places or objects. We read good and bad vibes, right?

I think the idea here is that our belongings come with strings attached that place us in another space and can also tie to something greater—say family or culture—something bigger than our personal selves. In addition, I’ve come to think that the linchpin is about story, the unseen trigger to attachments. That chair over there for example? Now faded and empty; it was your grandmother’s favourite rocker and despite the reality that she has been gone for a while, the very quintessence of the chair pulls at the strings, an emotional reflex that is rooted in her former essence, her Being and along with it your personal interpretation of her era and stories from that time.

Take-out coffee in hand, I’m perched on a tree stump, the lapping water of the Bay at my feet. The topic of belongings coasts through my foggy brain. I feel it in the ground; right beneath the soles of my boots I sense the legends that are trapped within; a cache, a millennia of voices, dialects; a parade of resonating footsteps conscripted into this tiny passage on earth. Until the age of steam and the dredging of the Murray Canal to the north from where I am, belongings that traversed this space were precious, hand crafted and treasured for their usefulness; revered for meaning and qualities.

The Carrying Place was a lay-over, a resting place along an ancient trade route as extensive and important as the Silk Road or the Amber Road—bead trading—of the Far East; the savoury exchange of the Spice and Incense Routes. Here at Carrying Place an exchange of goods and reports originating from the network of Peoples throughout the various river systems—Moira, Trent, Ganaraska, Gananoque, the Don and Humber—feeding into the Great Lakes would converge. The way-lay of a portage was a time for engagement and reunion in which a belonging would have been sewn, narratives and information shared.

I fast forward to the world of today and see myself caught up in the post-WWII hurricane of material production and acquisition, an over-surplus most of which holds little relevant or authentic core values. My response is to reach out, or rather reach back, to sounder meaning as I move toward a chapter in my life where less is more, unburdening myself from the deception that the physical presence of goods retains connections to human values. A few objects will pass the test of genuine family artifact, but the rest I will allow to slip away, removing impediments to future freedom.

My coffee now done, I hold a small flat stone in my hand. It’s been a while now since I’ve skipped a stone across the water; I’m thinkin’ that this will be the ceremony, of tossing randomness to the heavens. Zugehörigkeitsgefühl.