be-member (remember and be)

To be whole, tend the whole

Original artwork by Nicola Visser (justartworks.org)

There is a forest to which I have always belonged.
Even before I could name it, before I could trace its moss-soft pathways with poems and stories, I knew the soothing rush of its rivers through my bones.

But there was a time when I stopped hearing it. Not all at once… just a slow, almost imperceptible vanishing. Until the voices of deadlines, duties and “how things are done” grew louder than the language of leaves and lichens.

It's strange, isn’t it? To belong utterly, and yet to live as though you are apart. To be a root in the soil… and yet still feel untethered.

Every now and then, the forest would find me.
A circle of women holding silence as I wept.
A conversation where someone truly listened without fixing or turning away.
A moment by the sea where the wind blew me edgeless.
In those moments, I could feel the green threads again… the ones longing to weave me whole.

It is through five years of training in the art and practice of Focusing, as taught by the philosopher Eugene Gendlin, that I am learning to follow these threads inward… to give voice to an embodied knowing that grows from within, before words.

More recently, in late 2024, I stepped into a two-year teacher training in Thinking at the Edge (TAE) with Beatrice Blake: a way of thinking that begins in the body, in what we already know but have not yet found words for.

TAE does not borrow the concepts of others, stitching them into our own. Instead it draws out what is implicit, what the body has known for years or decades, waiting for words that are truly its own.

Often, these projects reach into what we most deeply care about. Not to transplant another’s ideas or words into something that justifies our beliefs or practices, but rather to notice and articulate what has been growing in us all along.

For me, it is a lifelong journey: learning how to belong… how to unravel the tangles that have kept me separate from the living tapestry that holds us all.

In my current TAE project — exploring how a community collective can flourish without succumbing to the fragmenting patterns of individualism and competition — a word surfaced that I had never seen before, and yet it felt like it had been calling to me my whole life:

be-member

The word didn’t arrive all at once.
It came like a mycelial network… threads surfacing here and there, connecting moments that, at first, seemed unrelated.

One thread began in a women’s circle in 2007, in the rural town of Denmark in Western Australia. We sat in a candle-lit circle, sipping cups of fresh lemongrass tea, listening without comment as each woman spoke.
No advice. No fixing. No haste to comfort so the tears would stop.
Just presence. Just witnessing.
I left that night with an unmistakable sense: this is how belonging feels.

Another thread ran through a co-created community arts project, Unravelling: Denmark Stories, for the Brave New Works Festival in 2009. Fifteen women sat in a circle, sensing into a kind of shared knowing of how our stories longed to be woven together and offered to the wider community.

It wasn’t about forcing a plan.
It was about listening together for what was possible between us — something called through the field itself, larger and more important than any of our individual preferences.

We became the banks of the river, giving it shape while allowing the current to find its own direction.
Each eddy, each snag, had to be met and acknowledged before the flow could move forward again.
Every voice mattered… and none more than another’s.

We were equals.
We were custodians.
We were listening for what wanted to arise through us.
I left that room with the same deep knowing: this too is how belonging feels.

This pattern of listening to what wants to emerge has continued to weave through my life, most recently in my work with Befriend, a community-tending non-profit in Perth, Western Australia.

Here, we don’t arrive with ready-made solutions or fixed agendas. We walk alongside people, groups, and communities, trusting that they already carry the wisdom they need to navigate their own way forward.

Our role is to help nurture the conditions for that wisdom to surface — slowing down, sensing deeply, and letting the shape of things emerge from within the community itself. In these spaces, I feel the same threads I have known in other circles: the quiet joy of co-stewarding something alive and ever-changing, moving forward in its own way.

Original artwork by Nicola Visser (justartworks.org)

In one of my recent TAE sessions, I saw it clearly: something that symbolised my felt sense of the forest we are both tending and becoming:

A human form stood with a tiny green tree-sprout rising between their feet — its roots deep in the earth, its trunk and leaves growing inside the human being, filling them from within.

They were not alone. All around, other beings stood in a circle, each with their own inner sprout, all tending the same living forest together.
And as they tended, the forest was tending them.
Life itself was reclaiming these beings, re-membering them into the whole living system.

The sprout had a word for me:

be-member (remember and be)

I sat with it for days, weeks, tracing its threads through my life.
It felt ancient, as if the word had been spoken in other tongues long before I arrived… and yet utterly personal, grown from my own soil.

I began to see how be-member is not something to be earned, claimed, or granted… but something life calls us into when we are ready.

A re-membering from within.
A restoration of the whole.
A re-storying of who we are… together.

Here is what the word told me it means:

be-member or bemember (verb) — to remember from within; to be re-woven into the living whole in which one has always belonged, even while stepping consciously toward it.

It is an intentional unravelling back into the weave that holds, roots, and sustains us — a restoration called forth by life itself.

To be-member is to live as the forest, the river, and the circle of life live in you — tended and tending, becoming and being what you already are.

Be-member: to be whole, tend the whole.

It is the paradox of belonging:
We have never left, and yet we can live as though we are apart.

We are already of the forest, the river, the mycelial weave… and yet we can choose to step toward them, again and again… until there is no more space between us — only the hum of the forest in our bones.

Acknowledgement:

With deep gratitude to Nicola Visser of justartworks.org — for her beautiful, heart-sensed artwork, and for her encouragement to bring this story of be-member into a wider world.