Grace for the ones who don’t match and stay anyway.
I am learning to belong the way an erratic does:
A stranger in the landscape.
Erratics don’t match and that’s how you know they’ve journeyed.
An erratic is a boulder out of place.
A remnant stone carried by glacier and
set down somewhere else.
Erratic, from the Latin errare: to wander, to stray, to make a mistake.
Perhaps, to bear its weight.
To stay standing through the movements -
A testimony of time. A carrier of endurance. A memory of movement made visible.
To feel erratic might be to feel like an erratic: A body of self that has survived great movement, deposited in a new psychic or geographical landscape, unfamiliar yet undeniably present.
Maybe an erratic is created in the after party of departure from the codependent cults in family, country, institution, normative identity, conventionality, relationship.
After the demands of obedience, silence and other costs of its faux-security are resisted.
After too many questions are asked.
After you refuse to be subject or object.
After the golden light turns cold.
After being unhooked and unhomed.
Maybe to celebrate oneself as an erratic is where the cult’s golden-child-turned-scapegoat finds warmth again, by staying in place and not position.
And on a collective scale,
through supremacy, war and displacement,
settler colonialism creates erratics.
Peoples dislodged from culture, land, story, ritual, center.
Memory.
Erratics without memory become erasers.
Erratics who remember become markers.
We hold back our own freedom and others’ when we cannot name what and who have come before us.
Sometimes, to belong to yourself
you have to become erratic:
unmoored, unclaimed, and misread.
You have to let the original root rot
so that something deeper, more honest, more mature, can break through.
You feel the clean guilty pain of growth towards the future and away from the growth-thwarting system.
You break from the national myth.
Not to wander forever but to make room for your full size within a different kind of belonging.
Maybe we can reroot right where we are. In the same landscape yet shapeshifted and demagnetized towards old cult dynamics.
This is the work of the ReRooted Rebelles -
those who say no to false belonging and want support tolerating growing past it. Ready to tap into resource older than capitalism and empire. Placement deeper than approval.
The boulder does not apologize for being there. It does not smooth its edges to match the local stone. It does not try to roll away, or make itself light.
It rests in its weight.
Calling all erratics ready to reroot and rise.