Summoning

Shari Zollinger

“I've always tried to make a home for myself, but I have not felt at home in myself. I've worked hard at being the hero of my own life. But every time I checked the register of displaced persons, I was still on it. I didn't know how to belong. Longing? Yes. Belonging? No.”                 –Jeanette Winterson

What if we were born with an assumption, we tiny creatures without verbal webbing in our already-formed pulsing cortexes, and what if that assumption was simply that we belong to the world and the world belongs to us so long as our gooey little bodies spill out into gravity? Would we also have been born with the hope that this sense of belonging was stable, meaning for all time, forever and ever?

And how do we reconcile the betrayal we feel when we learn that belonging never was the static act of our grand assumption? That we'll have to walk round its bend repeatedly and will get caught inside the crook of its elbow, and that we’ll get lost. How do we learn to walk the unmapped territory where we wander the in-between?

I once tried a thing they called soul retrieval. A bandied term, thick with ambiguity. What kind of thing is this? And yet, what kind of a thing IS this, materialized as answer. What to do about this lostness that keeps returning, like a clock, to jolt and rock and tick.

The practitioner lay by my side, hip to hip, after calling upon the four directions of the world. She took the responsibility for driving from me for just a moment, and I was grateful because this was usually mine to bear. Why was it such a relief to let her hold the space for this expedition, as I handed over my consent for her to act upon my body, just this once, not as renunciation but as investigation? To scry inside my webbing to see what I’d not seen. To lead me through a matrix of memory.

After some time, when all I had to do was lie on a decorative rug next to her, she sat up with a story to tell. Was this what she meant by retrieval? That she was the gatherer of lost stories? Her story was about a rock. The rock was in the hand of a girl. The girl's hand was clenched around the rock. The rock and the girl were asleep deep underground. The girl was 8 years old. As the rush of the story came down inside our space, I thought, well, there was a time when I was 8 years old and we were exiled from the sprawling Mormon farm full of cousins and playmates and caretakers. And were given orders to leave. Reasons as messy as families are, the breaking fraught with financial mistakes, personality conflicts, scapegoats. And because I was 8, and I didn’t know that eventually I’d break with this tribe deliberately; I’d taken the orders as religious gospel. As once we might belong, so too shall we not. We became, in my 8-year-old head, the boxcar children looking for pine needle beds. And because we were used to caretakers in multitudes, how then would we survive, being reduced to two parents who’d possibly never considered that they’d have to bear the emotional weight of 9 children on their own?

What if this story buried itself inside a rock in a small bird-claw-hand, deep under the earth because this girl simply didn’t want to leave this place? Perhaps at that point, she’d searched the farm, walking dusty paths by the cow corral, next to the silage pit, underneath the red-twined hay bales for a place to bury one little piece of her with a rock to keep her company, and she’d allow this separation because, although leaving was inevitable, perhaps it could be mitigated by letting one piece stay, one piece of rock like a little bird.

How long do we stay in a place with our hands wrapped around stone?

Then the practitioner excavated the metaphorical rock and, in shamanic diffusion, blew the rock back into MY belly, creating a crossroads of then and now, where something lost was found. Something buried, reclaimed. And in that act, she summoned belonging as the revolutionary remembering of something I was finally ready to take up and embrace.   

"Summoning" debuted alongside a film by Amanda Madden, A Spell for Queer Home, in 2023 in Moab, Utah. In this lyric essay, the summoner leads a seeker to revisit childhood traumas and achieve a breakthrough.