Being Unrooted...

You too are to be uprooted, to fall into the toss and tumble of life.

I recently discovered the music of native American singer Joanne Shenandoah. Her album, Peacemakers Journey, captivated me, especially this track I played on repeat. It tells the journey of a legendary peacemaker that brought warring indigenous peoples of different nations together to live in peace.  

Shenandoah passed away in November 2022. 

She once lived in the DC area, where she had a computer consulting business. According to The New York Times, in 1990, she had a revelation while staring out of an office window:

“she saw a massive oak tree being taken down. It occurred to her that just as the tree was being uprooted, she, too, had been uprooted, removed from her Native soil…That’s the moment she decided to return to Oneida…She was very successful, making a lot of money, but she wanted to make music full-time, and so she left, without a safety net.”

Quoted in The Washington Post, “I was working very hard and was doing all the things I thought were important in life… “One day, I was looking out my office window. This huge tree was being cut down, and something clicked: What am I doing with my life here?”

The rest is history now, a story of a life lived fully to bring peace and healing to a divided nation through song and to honor the childhood name given to her by the Oneida Nation, Tekaliwhakwah (she sings).

Many of us grapple with the tensions inherent in being rooted or unrooted. As a child, I lived in many countries, constantly being uprooted. When I arrived in the US as a college student, I was envious of classmates who spoke of their hometowns. They could point to a home they had grown up in, of friends they had known since kindergarten. While some of their hometowns did not sound that exciting, these classmates were all at least from somewhere. To me, there was a sense of safety and stability in that.

After graduate school, I moved to the DC area in 1990. In the same year I began to set down roots, Shenandoah uprooted hers. Having a fixed place to be, gave me the sense of stability I had yearned for. During the first 25 years of my life, I lived in 5 different countries, some more than once. For the next 25, I lived in one city, in three or four different homes, but none more than a stone’s throw from the other. Having adopted a hometown as an adult, when people ask me now where I am from, the easy answer to give is Washington, DC (with evidence to support it.)  

A few years ago, approaching three decades in DC and five decades on this planet, something began stirring in me. I became more aware of the quickening of time. And while my life in DC was comfortable, it had become routine. The illusions of security and stability were less important. Was it not time to seek out new shores in the time left?

I spent a lot of time by Rock creek, which flowed right through the city through a swath of natural parkland where deer, ducks, snakes, and other creatures could roam freely.  

I got to know the creek quite well. Sometimes it was a trickle and a raging torrent after heavy rains. On one such occasion, I saw an uprooted tree thrown onto some rocks in the center of the river. And then these words came to me: 

You too are to be uprooted, to fall into the toss and tumble of life… 

There is often a stoic romanticism about being ‘rooted’ in a place, being fixed and firm, and holding steady despite what happens around you. Or, by extension, staying ‘rooted’ in a job or a relationship that no longer suits you. 

I have come to see that this is a false sense of rootedness in which we conflate stability, security, or familiarity with being rooted. That’s why I put the word rooted in quotes in the previous paragraph. I am not saying that stability and security are not necessary. They can be. But to paraphrase Shenandoah, we often do all these things that we think are important in life, but deep-down other calls and yearnings go unanswered. 

Furthermore, we seek this false rootedness in people, places, or things that are subject to change, which is pretty much everything in the external world. We live in an illusion, sometimes a persistent one or satisfying one, but an illusion, nonetheless.  

Once we see these two things, we are invited to explore our roots and what true rootedness means to each of us personally. We may find that the soil we allowed ourselves to be planted in no longer feeds us. Our roots may not have enough room to spread. The canopy of leaves may have grown bare, and we yearn to stretch toward the sky just a little more.

Like Shenandoah, we may have an epiphany and realize that we are not rooted but, to the contrary, have been uprooted from where we belong. 

To be in a place where we no longer or never did belong, in work we don’t like, with people we don’t love, or ruled by socio-cultural norms that restrict our full self-expression, is to be unrooted. The stability and security we have gained by digging in can stagnate into complacency or, worse still, chains.

We are entangled in a tangle.

And so, we begin to untangle the assumptions of rootedness, no longer requiring of it a place, a person, a thing. There can be fear of being thrown into the toss and tumble of life and curiosity and excitement about what we discover.

And so, the questions, then, are along these lines:

Am I rooted where or as I am? And if not, where, or what, have I been uprooted from? Where do I belong?” 

There are no one easy answers to any of this, but there are ways to discover them: 

1. Plants are our only reference point in the universe for roots and rootedness. So spend time with plants, especially trees, on your streets and in your gardens, parks, and nature preserves. Sit under trees. Pay attention to their roots—roots that break through the pavement, clamber over rocks or alongside rivers, roots that spread wide, roots that dive down deep, roots that cling to cliffs, and roots that have been uprooted. Observe them closely and see what they evoke in you. And then also look up at their trunks and branches and canopies.

2. Sit with the inquiry of whether you have simply adopted a generally held view of what rootedness means. If so, begin to explore it afresh. For example, ask: can I be rooted in a physical place without being planted there?

3. Look to the lives of others, such as Shenandoah, who have grappled with this, and glean insights from their choices, experience, and wisdom. Many indigenous and native people have been uprooted from their ancestral lands against their will.

4. Stretch from an inquiry of place a physical location allow more metaphysical, holistic, spiritual, or poetic coordinates of place, and hence, rootedness to emerge.

If you can embrace the paradox inherent in this exploration, so much better. As Virginia Woolf wrote in The Waves:

“I am rooted, but I flow.”