Querencia – (Spanish)

The homing instinct … toward a place of safety

My high school theology teacher Ms. Lemieux, may she rest in peace, beamed at our often scornful, occasionally wise-cracking teen selves as we sat in uniformed rows before her. She called the assignment a Love Bombardment, which didn’t help. We were to arrive the next day with a list of what we liked about our classmates. When the time came, she mortified each of us by making us stand at the top of the room, face forward, as our class dutifully mumbled the words they managed to get down on paper.

For the rest of the day and perhaps that whole week, a few dozen of us moved through the hallways from class to class, more upright, open, and taller.

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In a talk entitled Our Path to Belonging, the Buddhist teacher Tara Brach tells of an African tribe that commences a ritual when someone violates the rules or behaves in a way that creates mistrust.

They call together and gather all members of the tribe. They form a big circle around the person. Then everyone in the tribe tells that person what’s good about them. Stories about the generous things that they did in their life. This ritual recitation can last for days. And when it’s over, everyone celebrates as the person feels their belonging again. It was never not there, only forgotten.

She quotes Professor Louis Cozolino: “We are not the survival of the fittest. We are the survival of the nurtured.”

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Ernest Hemingway wrote:

A querencia is a place the bull naturally wants to go to in the ring, a preferred locality. In this place he feels that he has his back against the wall and in his querencia he is inestimably more dangerous and almost impossible to kill.

A scrap of memory – me sitting on the District line with my headphones, listening to the poet David Whyte explain home is wherever you notice your belonging.

Maybe it’s less a case of wherever than whenever.

What becomes possible when home is a group of good people?

Last Sunday, I was certified as an Integral Development Coach – the culmination of a year’s work (including what a fellow student calculated as PhD dissertation-level writing assignments). For four days, from Thursday to Sunday, we were twenty-five small squares on the screen.

During the year, we gathered like this four times. Between these formal sessions, we met in pairs, small teams, and larger group meetups. We texted, emailed, called, asked each other for help, and received faithful replies.

At this final session, we spent the first three days calling each candidate forward to review their work for several hours. Each assessment started with the group watching a thirty-minute video of the person coaching a client. Altogether, an elaborate choreography of intense examination. Even though final evaluation bannered this marathon, and faculty ensured specific criteria and certain standards were met, the group approached each person without judgment – as if critical thoughts were an impossibility.

It blew me away. What you can learn, how much you perceive when you tune to a person’s greatness.

This stethoscopic-seeing afforded a stance that led us to wonder into each unfolding example with generosity. We attended to each case as if we were listening for the beating heart of it – as if we had cocked our heads for finer discernment, as we pressed our stethoscopes forward.

Each apprehensive soul stepped into the center of all our attention, only to receive that elusive blessing that the great humanist Carl Rogers labelled unconditional positive regard.

And it wasn’t as if the faculty were not fully capable and practiced in the art of delivering prods and suggestions – as if they didn’t know exactly how to raise gentle critique. And it wasn’t as if each candidate, over those long drawn out days, didn’t expect that their video would be the first to break the spell and elicit a less favourable response – that surely not everyone’s work would be as celebrated as the last.

And when that pushback never happened, when it never arrived, querencia inched its way all around.

And now, after all this seeing and knowing, I can’t conceive of hesitating to send a loved one to work with any one of these people.

What becomes possible when the entire group has your back? I don’t think it’s an experience many of us know. It’s not easy to find such community, but I notice what becomes possible when you offer this quality of welcome to just one other person.

We each make a nest
And they’re imperfect
And they’re unravelling
as we speak
When someone is in trouble what we can offer is ourselves
We can’t say I can make this go away
But we can say: Come in and sit down.
– From Rumi, the 13th century poet

And this is how people become our home.

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This post is dedicated to the recently certified and soon-to-be certified friends and to the tremendous kindness and skill of the Thirdspace faculty members:

Sue Braithwaite, Phetsile Dlamini, Nothemba Mxenge, Andy Rogers, Neena Sims, Amanda Visagie, Justin Wise & Lizzie Winn.

And our graduating gang:

Alaina, Alex, Alexandra, Anna, Fukuko, Gunda, Holly, Julie, Linda, Lindsay, Lizzie, Nancy, (other) Nathalie, Richard, Sam, Simon, Xana and me.

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