When the world feels fractured, the ancient wisdom still holds.

—

Something strange is happening. In conversations with people across the spectrum—different ages, backgrounds, beliefs—I keep hearing the same quiet confession: I don't belong here anymore.

It comes from those who feel their country has changed beyond recognition. From those who sense the old certainties crumbling. From those who look at their neighbors and see strangers where friends once stood. The words vary, but the ache beneath them is the same.

I hear it, and I recognize it. I've felt it too.

When I wrote The Lightkeeper Chronicles, I didn't set out to write about this particular wound. I was following a story about a village, a tyrant, and sleeping dragons. But as the words came through, I realized the parable was teaching me something I needed to learn.

The Three Groups

In the story, when the King's herald comes to chain the sacred Listener Stone, the villagers respond in three ways.

The Believers nod with relief. Order at last. The King knows best.

The Clear-Sighted watch the soldiers' hands and eyes. They see what is happening and refuse to look away.

The Watchers stand with folded arms, waiting to see which way the wind will blow.

I wrote these groups as allegory, but they live in us. Most of us have been all three at different moments—trusting authority when it felt safer, seeing clearly when we found our courage, watching and waiting when we couldn't yet choose.

The shadows in the story—the Negatives—feed on this division. Yamamm whispers you are nothing to the powerless and you are everything to the powerful. Vessith turns familiar faces into threats. And in that fracturing, belonging itself becomes a casualty.

The Oath That Holds

What saves the village isn't a hero. It isn't a sword. It isn't even the dragons—not directly.

What saves them is a choice to hold something together.

Light kept is light shared. Oath kept is oath strong. We are many. We are one.

When the widow sings and the boy speaks and the elder taps his cane, they aren't defeating the shadows through force. They're starving them. Shadows cannot stomach a people who keep faith with each other.

This is the medicine I keep returning to when that "I don't belong" feeling rises in my chest.

Belonging isn't something the world gives us. It's something we create—voice by voice, hand by hand, lantern by lantern.

The Lantern Road

There's a moment in the story when the resistance stops being hidden. Windows light up across the village, then across neighboring villages, until the night itself can no longer pretend to be dark.

The elder calls it the Lantern Road.

I think about that image often. Not as metaphor but as practice. What if belonging isn't about finding the right group, the right community, the right place where everyone agrees with us? What if it's about lighting our own window and trusting that someone down the road is doing the same?

We are many. We are one.

Not because we think alike. But because we choose to hold the light together.

A Practice for These Times

If you're feeling that displacement—that quiet grief of not belonging—I want to offer what the story offered me:

You are not alone in feeling alone.

The fracture you sense is real, but so is the thread that connects us beneath it. Shadows thin when we speak truth aloud, when we reach across the divide to clasp a hand, when we refuse to let fear choose our neighbors for us.

Light kept is light shared.

Your light—the one you've been carrying quietly, wondering if it matters—it matters. Not because it will single-handedly change the world, but because somewhere, someone else is lighting theirs, and together we become a road.

—

The Lightkeeper Chronicles: The Rise of the Dragon is available on Amazon. It's a story about tyranny and courage, shadows and light—and the ordinary people who remember that belonging is something we build together.

Next in this series: "The Wound Beneath the Divide: What Spirit Says About This Moment"

Linda L. McDonald is a writer, life coach, and modern mystic. Through TULA Light, she explores the intersection of story and spirit. Find her at Mystical Citizen on Medium.