Looking for inspiration

As you have already read in my previous blog, I travelled to South Africa for new inspiration. I will participate in the training week: I Am of This Place: Deepening Our Sacred Relationship with Life and with Land with Tanja Meyburgh and Sue Davidoff.
On Monday, this week will start. It is a week in which we will explore our sense of ‘belonging’ and nourish ourselves by connecting with the land through our senses, rituals, movement and land constellations.

Prior to this week, I first made a short tour through this beautiful country. The influence of the Dutch, who colonized the country here from the mid-17th century to the 19th century, is indelible and the impact of this period is still present.
While driving through the southern part, you will mainly encounter Dutch place names and street names. Afrikaans (almost Dutch) is officially the third language of the country – next to English and the traditional languages of the original inhabitants. The wine farms, coveted by tourists and offering wine-tasting opportunities, hide a traumatic past for the original inhabitants.
The indigenous Khoisan population was expelled by the Dutch and has been without a homeland since. Apologies have now been made – at the end of 2022 – for the slavery past by the Dutch government and in July 2023 by the king himself. However, I still notice little awareness of this past in Dutch society. And South Africa was hardly mentioned in the speeches surrounding the apology.
An apology is a first step, but then the real work should start, but I don’t see much of that yet.
In my opinion, the protests by the Khoisan in October 2023, during the visit of the Dutch king and queen, were therefore entirely justified.

This history of the Netherlands always gives me a bad feeling. Whenever I am confronted with this history, I prefer to escape into ‘NOT belonging’. I have a fantastic excuse – born and raised in Limburg – a province that was not yet part of the Netherlands in the centuries in question. However, I have lived and worked in the ‘real’ Netherlands for over 40 years, but I still have the feeling of ‘just not belonging’. I don’t even know if it’s ‘not wanting to fit in’ or just ‘feeling left out’.

Who knows what the next week will bring me. On to: I Am of This Place.

To be continued.