“Sit. Feast on your life,” Nobel-winning poet Derek Walcott exhorted in his breathtaking ode to being at home in ourselves. “We feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home,” Maya Angelou observed in Letter to My Daughter, “a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do.” But how do we find that place to make a home in, to set the table at which we can feast on our lives?

That’s what English poet and philosopher David Whyte — who has written beautifully about what maturity really means, how to break the tyranny of work/life balance, and the true meaning of love and friendship — explores in this soulful, lo-fi short monologue on the essence of belonging and what it means to come home to ourselves:

To feel as if you belong is one of the great triumphs of human existence — and especially to sustain a life of belonging and to invite others into that… But it’s interesting to think that … our sense of slight woundedness around not belonging is actually one of our core competencies; that though the crow is just itself and the stone is just itself and the mountain is just itself, and the cloud, and the sky is just itself — we are the one part of creation that knows what it’s like to live in exile, and that the ability to turn your face towards home is one of the great human endeavors and the great human stories.

It’s interesting to think that no matter how far you are from yourself, no matter how exiled you feel from your contribution to the rest of the world or to society — that, as a human being, all you have to do is enumerate exactly the way you don’t feel at home in the world — to say exactly how you don’t belong — and the moment you’ve uttered the exact dimensionality of your exile, you’re already taking the path back to the way, back to the place you should be.

You’re already on your way home.

Complement with Vonnegut’s magnificent commencement address on belonging, Hermann Hesse on what trees teach us about belonging, and Tove Jansson’s philosophical vintage Moomin comics on our quest for belonging, then revisit Whyte’s wisdom on anger and forgiveness.