Belonging and Blame
Today, I came upon an image—just a moment, really, captured in the flow of a protest, held high in the hands of a woman whose eyes carried warmth and a kind of radiant defiance. The sign she bore read: “They blame immigrants so you won’t blame billionaires.” And though it spoke in bold letters and urgent tones, what lingered with me most was not the outrage, but the quiet sorrow beneath it—the sorrow of how, in every age, fear seeks a face to blame.
This is not new. It is one of the oldest habits of power: to fracture what belongs together, to draw lines across the fields of our shared humanity, and to cast suspicion where there ought to be kinship. Like a shadow that moves through history, blame has been a tool—not merely to punish, but to distract, to divide, to harden hearts before they have the chance to open.
And always, it is the most vulnerable who become the symbols of fear’s projection—those who carry their lives in small bags, who arrive with nothing but hope and aching hands, who speak in another tongue, wear unfamiliar clothes, or bear the stories of lands torn by conflict. They are not the architects of our suffering. They are the witnesses to it. And all they ask—quietly, often without words—is for a place to breathe, to begin again, to plant some fragile seed of belonging in the soil of a new day.
But the soul, the true soul in each of us, does not play by the rules of fear. The soul does not abide the illusions of control or scarcity. It is not fooled by the glittering promises of the powerful, nor by the shifting narratives that tell us who to fear and who to revere.
The soul sees. Not through the eyes of judgment, but through the ancient clarity of compassion. It sees the child behind the label, the father behind the border, the mother behind the mask of statistics. It sees through the cloaks of power, through the noise of politics, and recognizes in every face the quiet dignity of one who longs to be seen, to be safe, to be held in the circle of belonging.
In a world where we are constantly being told what to fear, who to blame, and why to close our hearts, we must be careful where we allow our gaze to settle. For what we gaze upon, we begin to shape within ourselves. And if our eyes are always trained on threat, we will lose the ability to see blessing. If we only see difference, we will forget the ancient language of kinship that lives in all of us.
There is a radiance in the stranger. There is a story in the one we fear. There is sacred worth in the face we are told to turn away from. And the deeper tragedy is not that we fear each other—but that in fearing, we forget that we belong to one another.
The deeper invitation is not to rage, though rage may be understandable. The deeper invitation is not to divide, though division may seem justified. The deeper invitation is to remember.
To remember that we are woven from the same cloth of breath and bone. To remember that the borders we draw are not known to rivers, to birds, to stars. To remember that every system that isolates or excludes, that blames or humiliates, is already out of harmony with the human heart.
This is not to pretend that there are no wounds, no struggles, no injustices. The world is full of them. But healing will not come from louder blame. It will come from deeper seeing. From a quieter courage. From those willing to refuse the seduction of scapegoating, and instead to open their hands, their homes, their hearts to the stranger—and in doing so, find themselves.
The woman in the image smiled as she held her sign. And perhaps that is the paradox of it all—that even in protest, even in pain, there can be joy. Not the shallow joy of victory or argument won, but the deeper joy of knowing you have not let your soul be taken. That you have kept your tenderness. That you still see.
And so may we see—not just what the world shows us, but what lives beneath and beyond it. May we reclaim the ancient knowing that no one is “other.” May we live from that sacred center where all things are kin, and may the light we find there guide us home.
I love You,
Alma
