Kathleen Raine says: ‘Strangest of all is the ease with which the vision is lost, consciousness contracts, we forget over and over again, until recollection is stirred by some icon of that beauty. Then we remember and wonder why we ever forgot.’

We train our focus on beauty here or there—this poem, that architecture—because it is easier than bearing witness to our own story. We begin to gravitate not toward beauty but toward illusion. In this state, you are not approaching what you seek. You are running from your own face. But this is not the way of wonder. Wonder requires a person not to

So the unwanting soul sees what’s hidden, and the ever-wanting soul sees only what it wants.

The word ‘belonging’ holds together the two fundamental aspects of life: being and longing, the Longing of our being and the Being of our longing. Belonging is deep; only in a superficial sense does it refer to our external attachment to people, places and things.