Can we leave what we have known as safe, the familiar trappings of family traits, and traipse or gallop into the world unfolding? Can we become strangers to what never truly held us, never fully knew us, and in that chosen estrangement discover the essence of genuine connection?
Changing the Rules, Breaking the Game
We have been told who we are supposed to be since before we could speak. Most of us learned how to perform false belonging in order to survive the convoluted hierarchies we were raised in. If the idea that identity is imposed on us is a new concept, or you would like to understand it more, you may want to engage in this practice:
But now we might be able to make different choices.
Let yourself become a stranger to the constructs that have held you and the words that have diminished you. Become stranger than the names that structure separation. Defy the notion that you can earn goodness through performance or be protected from suffering by status.
We have no promise of finding home or forging repair, but perhaps we can weave sanctuary from the tattered threads, perhaps we can co-create a refuge for ourselves and those others who are also seeking truth.
This is the path of purposeful rebellion. We learn to walk beyond trails of tradition. We refuse to be on trial for our divergence. We transgress against legacies of dichotomy and become disloyal to the hegemony of hierarchy.
Be-trayal, to go a new way, be-trail, to become the way, to tell new tales that make new trails.
To insist on finding one’s own way even at the cost of false belonging, and thus to belong to one’s self again/for the first time/forever. We become wayfinders, creating new paths by walking unfamiliar ways, not as pilgrims or colonizers or foot soldiers, but as co-creators. Listening so deeply we learn to use our truest voices to sing along with emergent life.
“You are only free when you realize you belong no place—you belong every place—no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great.” ~ Maya Angelou
This is not an invitation to cause destruction for its own sake, rather a call to intentionally betray our indoctrination, to selectively break the rules of false belonging in service to a more life-giving truth. Everyone suffers from the confinement of a paradigm that requires performance to keep or seek belonging. Either by contorting into the structure and fragmenting to become a product that can be controlled and commodified, or by remaining a misfit and being systemically excluded and exploited.
In truth, what might feel like betrayal is actually a reclamation of our true selves, a repair of what was broken by the betrayal we experienced. Oppressive systems are maintained by people betraying life, betraying nature, and insisting others betray their core essences to survive. To look into that long stream of ritualized treachery and refuse to perpetuate it, by betraying the betrayer, flips the scripts and restores agency. It is a practice of faith and courage that may cost a lot but will lead to liberation.
Sacred transience
When we leave the familiar we may practice a kind of fugitivity. Great leaders of the liberation and abolition movements have usually been fugitives. The term is commonly used in relation to carcerality, as in a fugitive from police. Beyond that frame, fugitivity means operating outside of the dominant paradigm, slipping through the clutches of a culture of oppression.
In art-making the word fugitive is used to describe colors that fade quickly, that refuse to be held in place for long, that relate to their environments with rapid and responsive change. In this sense, fugitivity is an honest adaptability, a commitment to remain true to our essences even if we must become strange or invisible to those who expect to control our behaviors. We become fugitives from the stratifying nature of mainstream culture and the punitive nature of capitalism. We leave the paradigm of exploitation and become refugees, seeking a different way.
Harriet Tubman is one of our ancestral teachers of visionary fugitivity. Born into human trafficking in so-called Maryland in 1820, she was hit on the head by one of her captors as a child, and then had what they called sleep spells. Today we might call that narcolepsy caused by traumatic brain injury, but I appreciate the power of that older term. For her sleep was full of spells, she would wake with visions, what she perceived of as the voice of god giving her instructions. She found her way through forests and backroads to a state that did not have legalized human trafficking by following the guidance in these visions, by being spelled by her sleep.
She went back into those dangerous territories multiple times to rescue others because she was living the truth of her belief. Not that her people might be free, or could be free, but that we were already free, our nature is freedom.
She worked to bring the truth of our freedom into shared lived reality. She belonged to a present and future reality of freedom, persisting in living in alignment with her visions and inner wisdom despite how much that differed from how she had been trained to perform and obey. And that fierce, self-forged belonging helped her bring those visions more to life.
Part 2 is here: