Nature & Displacement.

I’ve been wanting to write this piece for a little while now. The recent wildfires in California have propelled this notion of how the future movement of people will be a result of natural disasters, over the wars, political and economic hardships we’ve become desentizied in relating to. 

The effects of displacement is a theme that runs deeply within the reflections and meditations that stem from my childhood displacement experiences.

To begin my deep dive into the idea of Displacement, it is crucial to first examine the many “pieces” that are fundamental to the “wholeness” of a person, and in the absence of even one of those pieces, a person is subject to fragmentality- an inability to ever truly become whole again. 
-Thi Bui, “What Gets Lost.” 

I’ve been wanting to write this piece for a little while now. The recent wildfires in California have propelled this notion of how the future movement of people will be a result of natural disasters, over the wars, political and economic hardships we’ve become desentizied in relating to. 

The effects of displacement is a theme that runs deeply within the reflections and meditations that stem from my childhood displacement experiences.

"dis-place-ment": the moving of something from its place or position.

I put the definition of the word displacement above. It identifies an object, or thing, or also, the moving of people from their place or position. The effects of displacement on the body and mind is what I am so strongly passionate about and the need to bring oneself home after displacement. That homecoming being to one's nature.

My own example is the case of a person displaced by war and uprooted from their origin. The effect of this displacement is great, and I wish the impact were more widely studied and known. In a spiritual sense, and the way that I most grapple with this topic, is that my soul, where I was most naturally born to bloom, was forced into exile by hands not of my choosing. It is one thing to decide on your own to see more of the world by moving away from what you have always known. It is another to be thwarted into an unknown place due to force, an emergency, or violence. The effects of this is what I am most interested in exploring. 

Being displaced has so many effects it’s hard to pinpoint which were the hardest to accept. Perhaps the feeling of not being home wherever you went was the most difficult.  That feeling of not belogining.

The what if's swirl around in your head of who you would have been if the war hadn’t broken out. What type of person you would have been if you had that normal upbringoing that many others take for granted. 

When I talk about growing up in Berlin, yes it is fascinating, but it doesn’t exactly give you an idea of what it feels like day in and day out to be an outsider looking in. It’s a weird phenomenon and not everybody experiences the world as intimately and with as much sensitivity as I, but for somebody like me, every misstep and feeling of being an outsider is deeply engrained in me. There were so many reminders that I did not belong. Your soul knows the truth. 

As we step into 2025, my belief is that displacement is going to reach people that were otherwise safe from forced migrations, or dislocations. I think that in the future, displacement will be the result of natural disasters. Natural disasters, such as floods, storms, earthquakes, and wildfires, will cause millions of people to flee their homes.

Those of us who have undergone this process, know what it’s like to lose your home, and have to start all over again. I wish for those displaced by natural disasters to find within themselves resilience, rigor and courage in starting over in a new place. It will not be what you have known, and it will take time for your soul to find itself home again. My wish is that as we experience more natural disasters that force people from their homes and into the unknown, that they find within themselves the strength to persevere the effects of displacement. It can take so much away from you if you let it. 

The past saw a movement of people feeling wars, violence, corruption, poverty and injustice in their homelands. This movement of people we have been accustomed to. The future will see the movement of people feeling natural disasters. How we handle the impact of such loss and grief is yet to be known. 

In the process that is healing from displacement, the answer will be to find belonging within yourself. 

When the world experiences what many others have faced their entire lives from an early age, there may be more sympathy towards those that had to flee to other lands to seek freedom. 

Nature is only beginning to move the needle towards this trend, as we see more and more movement of people across the US, and other areas of the world where climate conditions are forcing dislocation, or the displacement of the new type of modern migrant. 

In the process that is healing from displacement, the answer will be to find belonging within yourself. It will take time arrive here, but I do believe in the possibility to be whole again.