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Community offers the promise of belonging and calls for us to acknowledge our interdependence. To belong is to act as an investor, owner, and creator of this place. To be welcome, even if we are strangers. As if we came to the right place and are affirmed for that choice.

Each time I cross a border, I feel the push and pull in my body, a cacophony of competing desires. And always there are choices to make: what to assimilate, what to reject. Is it true that we are always, as migrants, and the children of migrants, attempting to choose what my parents call "the best of both worlds"? Or is it possible to tra

language for what I believe it is: a medium that is formed as it is used, a structure that is built by feedback effects, a road that is paved at the same time as we walk it.

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.

the acquisition of language has waylaid, or even kidnapped, our wanting (what, we may wonder, is the transformation involved in eventually putting words to wants?).

Language can contain an entire world, revealing its speakers’ history, values, or pathologies. It can also be obfuscating, diversionary, slippery. Chattiness, with its personality-driven appeals to familiarity, can conceal or elide false promises, banality, emptiness, controversy, and the context of its own existence

Each time we move, we must leave something of ourselves behind; perhaps then the map of a diaspora consists, like a constellation, mainly of gaps. And these distances gape in our memories, as in our personalities; we lack the physical objects, buildings, people whose presence might remind us of what we once were, might lend us some continuity.