It seems that it’s been important for me to belong to someone’s tribe. I’ve have been alert to finding places where I fit in, where I felt accepted. For the most part this has required my conforming and perhaps capitulating. Gradually, I’ve been turning that focus around.
Over a period of years, I’ve slowly been forming my own tribe. This is not at all an exclusive group; in fact it is rather open and airy. I don’t feel like I’m at all in the center of this tribe, but I am finding myself in the midst of “my people.”
Who are these people? As I look around me, they are the people I have fallen in love with. For some of them, I think the love is reciprocal, but that hasn’t been a condition for my loving them. For me, it has been a love freely and unconditionally given. Some of the people around me have turned into specters, ghosts I no longer see face to face but definitely are connected to my heart and part of my tribe.
Some of these individuals have no idea that they are part of my tribe. I have made them members without them even being aware it was happening. It is something that can happen quite casually and with little fuss. I may actually know very little about them, except that I am acutely aware of them and see them as lovable individuals. That’s all it takes, and they are in. They are connected to me, and they hardly know it.
There was a time when I longed for the very stones of the earth to speak and shout their love for me. I immersed myself in the ache of wanting to be loved. I didn’t know that, all along, it was I who had the power of speech, it was I who was unaware that I had the power to break the silence and acknowledge the beauty of anyone and anything I chose. I just had to wake up and pay attention.
I once was ready, even anxious to fall into the orbit around someone else. I never knew I had the power to shape the space around me and affect the orbits of others. I never want to cause anyone to change their orbit to go around me, but I know I can affect movement in the cosmos in small and subtle ways. That affects everyone I love.
No one has to do a thing except be their beautiful self and they may become a member of my tribe. If any of them ask me, “Do you love me?” I would without hesitation respond, “Of course.”
There can be no bartering in love, no initiation fee to enter my tribe. Membership is freely given, not an exchange, not given in return. It is good, pleasant and affirming when love is given in return. An exchange is not part of the deal of being part of my tribe.