I’m sitting now on a sun-baked terrace in Crete, typing high above the ancient Aegean, in a grand stone house stacked thoughtlessly onto a Miocene limestone mountainside. The early morning sun is already challenging the white stone arches and patios to another quotidian battle of UV radiation and expansion, and the cicadae have commenced their terrible mating cacophony which becomes the ceaseless backing track to every waking moment on this island. It’s stunning. The luminous teal of the infinity pool’s crisp lip lazily slices the impossibly azure eastern Mediterranean, bounded in this view by the rough Hellenides mountains carpeted with low olive, carob, cypress and pine.
Twenty million years ago, the Eurasian and African tectonic plates came together in a rocky and violent union and heaved into being this range which now falls endlessly back into the sea — an imperceptibly slow collapse that reveals some stunning rivulets, cliffs, crags, and gorges. A meeting of masses that forever changed the nature of the region, hosted arguably the earliest European tribes, and formed the backdrop for the dramas of Zeus’ birth, Icarus’s ill-fated solar trip, The Odyssey, and countless narratives of peoples pulling value from the arid ground, the bountiful sea, performing the primal merging of determination and survival that are the parents of civilization.
Struggling in my lightly Lutheran way with deserving this unique and rare opportunity and knowing I will dive with gleeful thanks into this pool in minutes, I am struck by the power of belonging. I’m here with a group of dear friends. We’ve collected each other across half a century of performance, college, and communal living in NYC, tied by threads of shared history, love of laughter, and trial by relative poverty. Ours is a membership easily reentered at any time, with light and careful respect for our individual development and strong foundations in the past. We belong easily together.
Belonging is a base animal need. We share it with most mammals. For Abraham Maslow — a 20th-century psychologist who created a famous hierarchy of needs — belonging sits only above the most basic needs of sustenance and shelter. We live to breathe, eat, and reproduce, then we find shelter to ensure those needs, and the very next drive is to solidify the previous two by forming bonds with others. Membership in collectives ensure the health of each member, open the possibility of shared productivity and specialization, and settle the spirits of members in the assuredness of place.
Whether it’s theater, a pickleball club, a bridge group, a men’s bookclub, or a simple group chat, we humans organize ourselves with barely a thought. We have friend groups, Facebook groups, shopping gals, golf partners, and running clubs. As homo sapiens, it seems to mean a lot to us to not only fall regularly into tight or loose associations, but then to spend real time and resources to define, arrange, redefine, name and advertise those associations. It means a lot to mean a lot to others.
Belonging is humans being secured in time as well. Imagine being able to say you were one among the Algonquin Round Table, The Knights Templar, The Chicago Bulls, or The Beach Boys. We hope our groups not only feed our current and individual needs, but also bend the arc of history in a way we would prefer, and at their most effective, bands of likeminded human beings can do just that. There is power in groups.
Association is essential, but at its base driven by individual need. I’m in a choir. We make noise more organized than the shrill of these cicadas. I hope that my voice adds beauty to the crafted sound, but I’m there because I benefit from the camaraderie, the friendships, and the commitment which is the nourishment of growth.
In Maslow’s hierarchy, above higher needs like love and cognitive challenges, sits the need for aesthetic self-determination. This need leads people and their groups to adorn their surroundings, dress themselves in a personal style, and begin to tell the stories of themselves. Songs, those comedies and tragedies of the early Greeks, the ancient palace we’ll visit later this morning — the Minoan Palace of Knossos with its florid frescoes of a mysterious bull-jumping sport — all hallmarks of group identity, and belonging.
Back home in Traverse City, we pride ourselves in telling our stories through membership in outdoor sports organizations, celebration of our stunning geography, wine-making, cherries, culinary finery, and of course the arts. There’s so much to define us in this wonderful place where we belong. In the early 1890s a determined group raised an opera house for our city on a not-yet paved Front Street to signal their commitment to the social fabric, and to house the stories of their time.
While you and your group are crafting your identity and considering belonging, why not commit to the arts, give to the cultural health of our region, and feed your needs by joining the tribe that demands a higher level of satisfaction of our everyday needs. Raise the live arts up among the things you demand to be resolutely you. Did I mention City Opera House now has memberships? Grab your pals, join us, and see you at the theater!