#belonging

#belonging

Wales has a beautiful roughness to it. Its beauty is not immediate and hard-won; visitors will have to trek, drive and withstand the rain in order to find it. But it's worth every step of the journey.

Kyoung Chun's creative practice moves between painting and site-specific installation. Interactive works extend the language of painting beyond the canvas, inviting viewers into environments that challenge perception and encourage connection.

The title was spontaneous, impulsive. It was inspired by Kenneth Anger. He has two films with 'Rising' in the title - 'Lucifer Rising' and 'Scorpio Rising' - and I wanted to make something in this supernatural, surreal, occultist, exaggerated, fantasy world, like his films.

The ghost of a previous lover is always a challenge, particularly if you (mistakenly) believe that she's actually dead. This is the unenviable situation for Lily, the protagonist of O'Farrell's second novel, who is swept off her feet by dashing architect Marcus and in short order moves in with him. Lily takes his assurances that her predecessor Sinead is no longer with us to mark a more permanent absence;

When I lost my best friend from college to a slow drift, I spent months analyzing what went wrong. Had I said something offensive? Not been supportive enough? The truth was simpler and more painful: I'd been so focused on fitting into my new work environment that I'd stopped showing up authentically in our friendship. This constant performance of trying to belong is utterly draining.

Walk through an airport bookstore, scroll the podcast charts, or listen to a leadership keynote, and you'll likely find lessons on boundaries and burnout. Celebrities talk about therapy with a casualness that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Coaches tell C-suite executives to " lead with vulnerability." And bestselling books like The Gifts of Imperfection, You Should Talk to Someone, and The Body Keeps the Score have given the world a common vocabulary for talking about anxiety, shame, and trauma.

That scholarship is rooted in his own experience as a Ugandan citizen of Indian origin who was twice rendered stateless due to political turmoil in East Africa during the 1970s and 80s. "We were migrants, and under the colonial system, migrants were defined as non-Indigenous," Mamdani said. That meant people like him were never made to feel fully at home in Uganda and were stripped of core rights.

In 1968, just months before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. looked out at burning American cities and gave an assessment of what he was really seeing. "In the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard," he said. King wasn't excusing violence. He was diagnosing the problem as something even deeper than disagreement over politics or values. Beneath the unrest, he saw the pain of people who had been speaking for a very long time, and who felt that no one in power was listening.

The Asian American and Pacific Islandercommunity is an umbrella term used in the United States to describe a diverse group of people with ancestry in countries across Asia and the Pacific Islands. Although the term is used broadly, it encompasses dozens of distinct ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and national groups, each with its own history and experiences. Despite this immense diversity, however, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities experience several shared forms of racism and discrimination,

To highlight the diversity of the city's restaurants the Sunnyvale Chamber of Commerce is presenting Sunnyvale Restaurant Week Nov. 8-16. Participating restaurants in this "citywide dining celebration" will feature special menus and creative offers of everything from falafel to pizza and breakfast to barbecue, with multi-course meals, chef's specials and perks like a complimentary appetizer, dessert or drink. For a list of participating restaurants, visit https://www.svcoc.org/sunnyvale-restaurant-week-about.

An obsessive, tortured domesticity runs through the fiction of Claire-Louise Bennett. The narrator of "Pond" (2015) forms an uncommon attachment to her seaside cottage: she takes great pains with the arrangement of her breakfast and her garden, organizing crockery "into jaunty stacks along the window ledge" and spending a memorable chapter on the deteriorating control knobs of her mini-kitchen. "Checkout 19" (2021), by contrast, is haunted by the absence of a proper home and the despair of unbelonging.

A member of our research team handed a five-year-old a crayon and asked her to draw what makes her feel like she belongs at school. She drew herself surrounded by Lego blocks. "I feel like I belong to school when I am playing Lego," she wrote. This wasn't what we expected in our latest study. After analyzing drawings and conversations with 108 children in their first year of school across Melbourne, our research team discovered something important.

The true hero's journey is the journey home—to each other, to the glow of a shared fire, to the village.

The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.

Consumer culture didn't just take our villages: It left us with parents too overwhelmed to fully show up.

The need for connection is evolutionary. Traveling in packs offered physical protection and emotional support. Ostracism threatens belonging more clearly and more strongly than other unpleasant social responses.

Belonging unfolds in stages from bonding instinct in infancy to complex cultural identities, but fitting in can lead to sacrificing individuality.

"At the K-pop-themed cafe event, I was surprised to see a mixed crowd, including other Black girls, and felt a sense of belonging I hadn’t anticipated. Everyone was friendly, and we quickly bonded over our shared interest."