Toko-pa Turner - Belonging

2017 Nautilus Award Gold Winner
2018 Readers Favorite Gold Winner
2018 Whistler Independent Book Award Finalist

Certain people invite you into an experience that will alter your world view forever. They have gone so deep, searched so thoroughly, traversed territories that most would shun, and then they return and lay their soul at your feet. Toko-pa is one such individual and this book is her soul made visible. She reaches her hand out to you and asks you to take a journey with her. If you are ready, take her hand and prepare to grow.

Clare Dubois, International Speaker and Founder of TreeSisters

An exquisitely crafted journey that explores the deep longings of the soul, the mysterious workings of our dreams, the bittersweet wisdom of the orphaned self, and the losses of our lineage that we would rather ignore. Toko-pa Turner speaks with poetry and practicality, pure compassion and profound integrity to the heart of what it means to belong to ourselves, to our people, to our communities, and to the earth. Belonging is the book I have been longing to read all my life.

Lucy H. Pearce, bestselling author of Burning Woman, Moon Time, The Rainbow Way

Belonging is full of profound insights that flower from Toko-pas powerful life experiences and her resilient, compassionate spirit. To me the central message of the book is that, to be truly original, you have to experience some sort of difference or exile from the club, and take that initiatory journey. Its a message I believe we urgently need to hear today, as there is such a strong cultural emphasis on fighting our differences rather than allowing them to bring us to a full reclamation of our own unique selves. Belonging is breathtakingly compassionate and surefooted!

Michelle Tocher, Mythologist and Author of How to Ride a Dragon, Brave Work, The Tower Princess

I cannot recommend this book highly enough! Not only is it full of timeless wisdom and glorious insights, its quite possibly the most beautiful book Ive ever read. Toko-pas voice is one of beauty and one of necessity in a troubled world. I consider her a vessel for genius, someone who has a direct line to the soul of the world and knows how to translate soul-wisdom into words that feel like home.

Seraphina Capranos, Herbalist & Homeopath

Toko-pa is such a wonderful, imaginative writer. Her love, intelligence, and bright ideas are shining on every page of this book.

Angela Gygi, Story Researcher for Paramount, HBO, Netflix

With astounding clarity and compassion, Toko-pa guides us to embody a humanity deeply rooted in our belonging and reverence for the grand dance of life we are part of. Through her exquisite word-magic, she midwifes the deep wisdom of our souls into incarnation.

Chameli Ardagh, Founder, Awakening Women Institute

Belonging is something quite extraordinary. Its more than just a book; its an experience. As I read Toko-pas writing, I found myself being transported, not to some distant place, but to my deepest core. Belonging is a mirror to our true face, revealing the exiled threads of our being so that we may gently re-weave them back into the greater fabric of which we are all a part. This is a book that provides living nourishment for these times and will be a classic for decades to come.

Bethany Webster, writer and international speaker on The Mother Wound

Copyright 2017 by Toko-pa Turner. All rights reserved. Published and distributed by Her Own Room Press (British Columbia, Canada).

Cover art and interior illustrations copyright 2017 by Molly Costello, used with permission. Cover layout and design by Toko-pa Turner. Author photograph: Morgaine Owens.

ISBN-13: 978-1-7751112-0-7

First digital edition: January, 2018
Second digital edition: March, 2019

www.toko-pa.com

Special discounts are available on quantity purchases of Belonging for book clubs,organizations, and others at www.belongingbook.com.

For orders by U.S. and Canadian trade bookstores and wholesalers, contact the publisher at ordering@herownroompress.com.

For Craig
who is the ground
in which my belonging
is rooted.

I wish to thank Terri Kempton, my friend and my editor, for walking with me every step of the way, masterfully midwifing the birth of this book; Angela Gygi who read the manuscript and offered me her rigorous and valuable feedback; Caoimhe Merrick for her lavish pages of enthusiasm; Michelle Tocher for encouraging me to put my story front and centre; Molly Costello who summarizes in one artwork everything I want to say; my late mentor Annie Jacobsen who, despite my reluctance, kept insisting I was a writer; and most especially Craig Paterson, my beloved husband, for showing me every day how belonging is made, through his unwavering presence, wise reflection, and the sheltering generosity of his tenderness. Finally, I want to thank Salt Spring Island, for holding me in its mystical branches, and lending its moisture to my words.

For the rebels and the misfits, the black sheep and the outsiders. For the refugees, the orphans, the scapegoats, and the weirdos. For the uprooted, the abandoned, the shunned and invisible ones.

May you recognize with increasing vividness that you know what you know.

May you give up your allegiances to self-doubt, meekness, and hesitation.

May you be willing to be unlikeable, and in the process be utterly loved.

May you be impervious to the wrongful projections of others, and may you deliver your disagreements with precision and grace.

May you see, with the consummate clarity of nature moving through you, that your voice is not only necessary, but desperately needed to sing us out of this muddle.

May you feel shored up, supported, entwined, and reassured as you offer yourself and your gifts to the world.

May you know for certain that even as you stand by yourself, you are not alone.

Love,

Toko-pa

T o this world you belong. To this moment, in this place where you already stand, something greater has ushered you. To the momentum of a long line of survivors you are bound. From their good deaths, succeeded by new lives, and to the incidents of love that seeded them, your story has been woven. With the wild jubilation of nature, you are in correspondence. By every seasons conditions, and by the invisible holy inclination, your life has been hewn .

And yet you may feel, as so many of us do, the ache of a life orphaned from belonging.

There are many ways to be made an orphan. Outright, by the parent incapable of caring for you, or by the ones who neglected to understand your gifts. By the System, which demands your loyalty but trades away your uniqueness. Or by history which, through intolerance and war, has made you a refugee.

But we are also made orphans by a culture that, in its epitomizing of certain values, rejects others, forcing us to split off from those unwanted parts of ourselves. And this is perhaps the worst orphaning act of all, because it is an abandonment in which we are complicit.

With this meagre scratch to begin it, without so much as the acknowledgment of all that weve been lost from, we must fare a way. We must begin with absencea longing for what might never be assuagedand follow it deep into the heart of exile, to discover what, if anything, can be made out of nothing. To make a foundling of the orphaned life.

Though it governs so much, belonging is rarely spoken about in the open. Like grief, death, and inadequacy, we are led to believe that to feel unbelonging is shameful and should be hidden from view. The great irony is that modern culture is suffering an epidemic of alienation, yet so many of us feel alone in our unbelonging, as if everyone else was inside of the thing that we alone are outside of. And keeping silent about our experience of estrangement is, in large part, what allows it to perpetuate.