LOVE WANT Issue 16: We are family
It’s hard to think of a term more delicately loaded than family. It’s rooted in love and brings warmth yet simultaneously can conjure frustration, isolation or indifference. Few things are more complex than these familial relationships we do or don’t call home.
It’s this inherent complexity that can lead us to tread lightly when it comes to understanding something that is fundamental to all of our being.
Yet, if you boil it down, outside of any traditional confines, family really just is belonging. Perhaps the most desirable thing in the world. It speaks to unconditional love and the deepest of understandings; a place for ourselves and the multitudes we contain to call home.
It was Austrian poet, Rilke, who made a case for a home outside our geographic origins, writing “We are born provisionally, it doesn’t matter where. It is only gradually that we compose within ourselves our true place of origin so that we may be born there retrospectively and each day more definitely.”
While he was (by interpretation) referring to the natural and continuous reinvention that comes from one's independence, it’s hard to imagine self-actualisation without a sense of belonging. In many ways, such actualisation and desire to belong, have become the fuel for all kinds of migration; the search for your people.
It raises the question, who and what makes us belong? And it’s here we turn to our chosen families. The people that have no claim or obligation yet love us regardless (and for the most part, unconditionally). There’s an undertone of acceptance and within that and those mutually chosen people (biological or otherwise) we are able to carve out a place for the most authentic versions of ourselves. It comes back to choice and love; a perfect combination of trust and generosity.
As a team deeply fortunate to have those relationships within families of both kinds we wanted to dedicate this issue to the people and things that keep us feeling understood.
We hope you’ve found your family and if you’re still searching, LOVE WANT and its pages will always be here.
