You Belong Here: An Illustrated Antidote to Our Existential Homelessness

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings

There is hardly a more elemental human need than our need for belonging — in a place, in a heart, in ourselves. Perhaps this is why we are so susceptible to that particular kind of loneliness that begins in childhood, as we try to master the “fertile solitude” necessary for self-esteem, and can so often morph into a kind of existential homelessness as we grow older and slip into continually narrowing landscapes of possibility.

“You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place,” Maya Angelou told Bill Moyers in their fantastic 1973 conversation about freedom.

That elusive, coveted locus of belonging is what poet and writer M.H. Clark explores in the spare and lovely You Belong Here (public library).