Throughout my life, I have continuously rediscovered how to belong. Perhaps this is a protectionist mechanism: it provides a sense of comfort. Perhaps this is something much deeper. Thinking back on the times that I have felt emotionally uncomfortable for prolonged periods (i.e. starting in a new city, a long breakup, establishing a new friend group), they all are rooted in an absent sense of belonging. Yet, once the feeling of belonging starts to develop again, I quickly forget that I ever felt adverse. Belonging, as I have found it, is tied fast to the sense of self. As you need wood to start a fire, an idea of self is required to ignite belonging.

More and more, I have been thinking about this concept on a scale much larger than myself as an individual. For years I have mulled over the ecological conundrum of species living “out of place”—distant from the geographic cradles that held them and local climates that rocked them to sleep for millions of years. Initially, my thoughts of non-native species began with the young preservationist’s hatred of ‘invasives’. I do not feel that way now. Now, I am much more confused. You can dig further into my thoughts on this topic in my recently posted philosophical essay On the Ecology of Compassion. Here, I would like to go into my thoughts on how our placement within the landscape interacts with our sense of self.

Humans have long been the champions of globalization. Sometime between 90,000-60,000 years ago, humans radiated out of Africa. Since, we have traveled into environments where we have no original manner being; however, upon our birth and as we grow older, it does not seem strange to us that the fields and forests of ‘home’ were foreign to our ancestors. How can I be a stranger in the only place I have ever been? I stand on that small hill by my house. How could I feel this way about anywhere else?

These questions of place and identity have struck me stronger than usual in the last few months. The catalyst? Annah and I began raising our first dog together: a Gordon setter named Aldo. Now, we share our Brooklyn rowhouse with a dog bred to hunt birds in the open fields and woodlands. He is out of place in the infrastructure and traffic. Yet, he exists here, and I would like to assume that he is happy.

(Note: this essay contains what could appear to some as anthropomorphizing—giving animals and other organisms human-like thoughts and feeling as an assumption. I argue that I make these assumptions based on behavior and the idea that feeling is shared across all organisms. Disagree if you may, as they are assumptions nonetheless).

But there is more to this. On our morning walks Aldo has taken an extreme liking—perhaps from a feeling in his blood—for the pigeons that line the city streets and murmurate between the bike paths and garbage trucks. Without prior training, he sees them and freezes, staring with a focus that is difficult to break. Here exists an interaction between three species: dog, human, and pigeon. Although vastly different, the three of us are united in alienation and adaptation. Like domestic dogs and humans, rock pigeons (Columba livia) are not native to New York City, or even the Americas—they are native to Western Asia, North Africa, and Southern Europe. Domesticated in 3000 BCE, they have spread across the globe amassing a population of over 400 million individuals. In their native range, rock pigeons are adapted to living on rocky cliff faces, hence their propensity for surviving in urban environments where anthropogenic monoliths of glass and brick mimic the precipitous walls of their homelands. Though far removed from the rocky palisades of their origin, these populations are still derivations of what once was home. In a larger sense, evolution is not static, so perhaps it is safer to say that the conceptual ‘home’ for many species is fluid, shifting to meet the needs of each generation. However, the rapid human-driven environmental changes in the last five hundred years have organisms held in the inertia of their evolution. This is why species rely on ecological familiarity when transitioning to emergent anthropogenic landscapes. They search for themselves in the unknown and create belonging.

Like the pigeons, Aldo exists in this purgatory of minutiae, albeit on a smaller scale—he is disparate from our designated ‘purpose’ for his breed. Yet, he has found the things in his world that make the most sense to him in accordance with his ancestry: the meadows of the park, pigeons, watching hawks and airplanes fly, companionship. He has gathered these and of them constructed self, creating belonging.

Philosophically, self is a messy word. The notion of self is unclear at its best and a disputed territory (read: warzone) and its worst. In this field I have little experience, but I have come to appreciate Søren Kierkegaard’s idea of self as defined in his book Sickness Unto Death. The first chapter begins as follows:

A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation's relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation's relating itself to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered in this way a human being is still not a self.

Although admittedly confusing on the first read (ok, the first few reads), this passage becomes more approachable when broken down. Simply put, Kierkegaard argues that self is a relation to the relation of itself—self-awareness is the processing and the creation of self in a feedback loop. Furthermore, Kierkegaard goes on to assert that the self is a synthesis of conceptually dichotomous abstractions of body and mind: the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity. The self is an amalgamate of these, which requires a dialectical relationship of body and mind to become one’s true self.

Kierkegaard, as many other philosophers have (and still do), limits self to humankind (“A human being is spirit”)—an essential brick in the zeitgeist of man. I am opposing this; in congruence with the way I exist and the way all other organisms exist, all life has self. With the inclusion of all life, I feel it is important to go further into my own thoughts of what underlies self in relation to Kierkegaard—I argue that deep history needs to be considered with equity when defining and becoming oneself. This, I clarify, is not solely from traits and dispositions written in nucleic acids and imported parentally—no, it is also from the feelings that have followed one through time—it is folklore, tradition, myth, curse, instinct: it is the sum of all else.

The history of life is the infinite, the eternal, and the necessary—from genes to feelings, the past is in a relationship with the actions of the present. This is the way we as organisms may discover where self is and where self is not—this is the way we may discover self where self is not. The finite finds pieces of the infinite, the temporal finds pieces of the eternal, the freedom of existence discovers, over and over again, the necessary. This is how we uncover belonging.

I believe this is how I recognize myself in the expanding meadows of Prospect Park, how Aldo fevers at pigeons as he would a pheasant in Scottish fields, how pigeons nest in scaffolding—it is the history of self and how we relate to it, and the relation it has to itself. It has taken hold of the remnant lineages of history. Through the relationship with oneself and the reconciliation, we create belonging—it is not given to or found by us. I think of self as a mend; it is the socks, both the wool and the darning—presence weaved into a storied past, creating a complete garment. We put these socks on and have belonging: the fabric that wears in the fault as we rub against existence.

Last weekend I found myself at 12,000ft in the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt overlooking Mexico City from the slopes of a dormant volcano. A professor and collaborator of mine from the Universidad Nacional Autonomous de México had driven me up from the valley so I could experience the high-elevation ecosystem—a pine-oak forest that becomes increasingly pine biased as you ascend; it is beautiful and strangely familiar. There is a reason for this—high-elevation environments at low latitudes share many ecological and climatic similarities with habitats at low elevations in higher latitudes. Yet, these habitats are often comprised of slightly different flora and fauna (many times convergently evolved forms), hence the strangeness. Imagine you walked into a house almost identical to yours—the furniture is in the right spots but are made slightly different; the art on the walls is in unfamiliar colors. Convergent ecosystems feel very much like this.

While walking, the shadow of a bird eclipsed my eyes. With the premonition of recording a new species to my life list (after all, I had never been there before) I lifted my gaze to the blue sky. I found the pine branch where it landed. The rust of its belly mingling with the pine bark, mimicking the dried undergrowth. It was an American robin (Turdus migratorius). Not only was this a bird I had already seen, but it was also a bird I am immensely familiar with from childhood (it is even Michigan’s state bird). When I close my eyes, I can hear its spacey whistling hang under the damp oak canopy of the back dunes. Although extremely acquainted with the robin, I was far from disappointed. Rather, I felt more present, as if the bird was a voice from deep in my past, welcoming me home again. I imagined building a small cabin in that exact spot; I imagined myself happy. We drove back down into the bustling valley that holds the largest city in North America. There were pigeons everywhere.

Inside a small caldera in Parque Nacional Cumbres del Ajusco, Mexico City

On the plane ride down to CDMX I sat across the aisle from a woman who was also scribbling in a notebook. Upon landing we struck up a conversation—it turns out that she was on her way to say goodbye to her friends in Mexico before embarking on a 10-month environmental anthropology Fulbright scholarship to record the sights and sounds of Tuvalu, a remote island in the Pacific Ocean that happens to be the least visited country in the world. It also happens to be sinking. Due to a combination of sea-level rise and the geologic nature of atolls, the islands of Tuvalu are returning to the sea. Her mission is fascinating; I think of the ephemerality of the places humans have come to call home. I also think of man’s obsession with immortalizing the fleeting and the intrinsic value in the finite. I fear human immortalization may be silly—the media produced by humanity will live on in and for humanity, but who knows how long that will last (especially given the current state of things, ha). I am reminded of Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine’s Last Chance to See—a book where Adams (of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy fame) and Carwardine travel the globe to find and write about critically endangered animals before they are gone forever—yes, of course! Thousands of millions of years of evolutionary history immortalized in a paperback. For a moment, I started to view such missions as fruitless, as selfish. But that is absolutely wrong—I have created such selfishness in my framing. Perhaps, in these instances, immortalization is the wrong word to use. I think what we are after is remembrance—a connection that relates to the history that defines us. There is nothing selfish about continuation. This is all part of the history of the world, of the identity of nations, of isolated ecosystems, endangered species, and ourselves.

[Seeing an aye-aye] was the kind of moment about which it is hard not to feel completely dizzy. Why? Because, I realised later, I was a monkey looking at a lemur.
-Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

I often listen to a pair of ambient albums entitled Rakka and Rakka II by Vladislav Delay. They are powerfully designed albums inspired by the deep, slow groaning and fast movement of the arctic landscape. While listening, I feel emotions rising from the low rumblings—sounds that remind me of dreaming as a child, of the S train moving past my Brooklyn apartment. Also resonating are swift sounds that evoke emotions I do not know how to describe but are essential to my being. Although I have experienced many Michigan winters, I have never lived close to the arctic. Yet, I find belonging in this droning. In mentioning this album to the woman on the plane, she relished in the idea that perhaps her recording would be used to make or inspire art, to transport the artist to those small islands; that it would reach broad audiences and bring familiarity—I think the sounds of sinking islands and fleeting ecosystems would reflect what many people feel about themselves: isolation, ephemerality, the finite and the temporal. I can imagine myself as those islands... I am sure you can too. This, in a way, is how we as humans engage with the relation to the relation we have with ourselves—through empathy, sympathy, and the search for familiarity. This, in a way, is self.

I landed back at JFK the next Monday—I opened the door of my rowhouse apartment to Aldo wagging his tail and whining with excitement. I took him for a walk in our familiar landscape. I told him about my trip and my thoughts of Kierkegaard; he stared at me with uncanny intent until I realized I was holding one of his treats. I gave it to him and he ignored the rest of my verbal meandering. We continued to walk.

So why did I want a bird dog? I’ve never bird hunted. Maybe I wanted the companionship of open country. Maybe I wanted someone else to suffer the Sisyphean task of belonging. My best guess is that it is part of my search for self. It is my search for familiarity in the unfamiliar. In this relationship I am forming with myself, I find I am posturing into an American ideal that is slipping away: a pedagogy in connection to the land and resources; a vertebrae in the spine of conservationism and of this country. I guess I am searching for something deep in the prairie grass. I will set and point it out for you when I find it.

Dogs, Pigeons, and the Philosophical Notion of Self

Red-throated Loons and the War on Science, Wilderness

On the Ecology of Compassion