January 18th, 2023—In her book Belonging: A culture of place, bell hooks writes, “Healing that spirit meant for me remembering myself, taking the bits, the pieces of my life and putting them together again. In mapping the territory, discovering myself, and finding homeplace”. The injuries to her spirit were the result of lived experiences including, rampant racism, moving from the country to the city, loss of deep contact with nature, strained family dynamics, and leaving her birth state of Kentucky. Her book is a personal reflection and social critique of the ways her spirit became divided and separated from its source of life and sustenance. And the long journey back to her “homeplace”, the physical place of healing where she could experience wellness and restore the strength and vigor of her spirit.
As I read Belonging, I found similarities between hooks’ experience of spiritual-separation and my experience of separation of spirit as an educator. Given my positionality as a white-male-cisgender person, I don’t claim any similarities or shared experiences related to race, gender, social class, or regional experiences. Although, her stories are uniquely hers and hers for the living and telling, I do find helpful similarities in her spiritual description of separation, the process of seeking again one’s “homeplace”, and my personal separation from and seeking again the essence of my call to teach. Her descriptions of pain and suffering often broke my heart and invited a deep sense of compassion and understanding that increased my commitment to equity and social justice in education. hooks offers me, in the stories she shares, a map and tools for resisting the ways that power and privilege distort what it means to be human in the role of educator.
The key to finding my way is naming the physical and spiritual “homeplace” of my soul through questions. What is my homeplace in education? Where in my work do I feel most alive and vibrant? Why did I drift away from that homeplace initially? What is the cost of continuing to wander away from my homeplace? Who or what is making it difficult to remain connected to the spirit of my gifts and talents?
One way for me to begin finding homeplace is to consider what I feel and experience when I drift away from a sense of belonging to self. One virtue of wandering away or being pulled away by social norms from the center of my being, is that the experiencing of separation can point me back toward wholeness. When I feel disconnected from my call to serve, I experience a sense of diminishment, blandness, and routinized behaviors. I’m being productive, by academic standards, but there is little light and passion in my work. I’m no longer home.
I’m reminded of the advice of Howard Thurman, “Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that”. The more I feel alive the more I know I’m closer to my homeplace. I say closer, because I don’t think as an educator, I never fully arrive in my homeplace. Finding homeplace has a certain dual meaning for me. It is a verb that conveys both a sense of arriving and the feeling of never settling completely. The nature of teaching is too complex and dynamic to remain static and moored to a particular set of experiences. Homeplace in my work is a set of activities (teaching, writing, leading, and service) around which I can ramble, explore, and seek out the places where I “come alive”. If my spirit feels deadened in one context, I try not to put too much energy into those tasks. Instead, I move on to a new location or experience that has been life giving in the past. And if I feel connected and energized, I root-in and continue the work that I’m called to do.
One consistent homeplace for me is the mentoring spaces associated with the classroom or the office. The chance to interact, one-on-one, even for a brief moment in the classroom, always feels natural and true to my calling. And when the time allows, during an office visit, for an extended conversation, my heart feels reconnected and less divided by institutional demands and responsibilities. I find that it is constant challenge to remain centered in my homeplace when the institutional norms foster division and separation, principally through rewards that value efficiency, productivity, and loyalty. When the gap between external demands and internal calling becomes too great. I find solace in hooks’ advice of “remembering myself, taking the bits, the pieces of my life and putting them together again”. My homeplace is always there and accessible, I need only return to it and reclaim my deep sense of belonging.
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