My father passed away two years ago.

He was a Greek immigrant who came to America carrying a language, a culture, and a way of seeing the world that I didn’t fully understand while he was alive. Growing up, I was always aware that I was supposed to care more about being Greek than I actually did.

I was raised with the expectation that I would embrace my heritage, marry within the culture, and help carry it forward. For a lot of reasons, some simple and some complicated, that never really resonated with me. I loved my father deeply, but I often felt disconnected from the community and expectations surrounding that part of my identity and the culture he came from.

Looking back, I think I assumed there would always be more time to figure it out. But there wasn’t.

His death was sudden and traumatic. One ordinary day turned into emergency surgery, devastating news, and impossible decisions.

Because of the language and cultural barriers between my family, doctors, and end-of-life care providers, I found myself translating and interpreting my father’s final wishes.

My father was the kind of person who would do anything for the people he loved. Even at the end of his life, he was worried about becoming a burden.

At that moment, I was no longer simply his daughter. I had become a bridge between worlds.

Grief has its own timeline and for a long time afterward, I couldn’t process what had happened. In a way, I couldn’t even articulate what I was grieving. Of course I missed my father. That part was obvious, but there was something else too.

When he passed, a thread snapped. I didn’t realize how much of my connection to my heritage was tied to a single person until he was gone.

Now, two years later, I find myself asking questions I never expected to ask. Questions about identity, heritage, and belonging. What does it mean to inherit a culture you never fully embraced? What does it mean to lose the person who kept that connection alive? Why do certain songs, buildings, meals, rituals, and landscapes move us so deeply? How do we honor our roots while remaining open to new possibilities? And what do you do when you no longer know where you belong?

I found myself becoming increasingly interested in other cultures, especially in East Asia. What started as curiosity turned into something much deeper. I found myself drawn to Japanese craftsmanship and attention to detail. To Korean stories of resilience and cultural memory. To Chinese history, where some of the most beautiful traditions are inseparable from stories of immense hardship.

For a long time, I thought I was exploring other cultures. Looking back, I think I was trying to understand my own story.

Again and again, I encountered the same thing: evidence of how human beings make meaning from suffering. The deeper I went, the more I realized I wasn’t just learning about other cultures. I was trying to understand something about people. How they endure. How they preserve beauty. How they carry memory forward.

Every time I learn about a place, I discover that beneath the surface there are stories of grief, resilience, sacrifice, love, and hope that feel surprisingly inescapable. The details change, but the human experience doesn’t.

Recently I came across a quote from Korean independence leader Kim Gu. He wrote that he hoped Korea would become “the most beautiful nation in the world,” not the most powerful or the wealthiest. He believed that what humanity lacked was not knowledge or material progress but love, compassion, and culture. Which still feels true today in some ways.

The things that have shaped me most have never been political institutions or economic systems. They’ve been stories, music, traditions, meals shared around a table, places that hold a memory and people who chose kindness despite their own suffering.

The more I learned, the more I began to see my father differently. I began to understand that belonging isn’t something we inherit automatically. It isn’t guaranteed by ancestry or granted by a passport.

Belonging is something we create. Through memory, relationships, curiosity, care, the stories we choose to preserve. And perhaps most importantly, through the bridges we build between ourselves and others.

The Art of Belonging is a place for me to explore the question that seems to sit underneath all of these interests:

How do places shape people, and how do people create meaningful places?

I don’t know exactly where this journey will lead. Some days it may take me into art, architecture, design, language, or history. Other days it may lead me back into conversations about grief, identity, family, and home.

But I know why I’m on this journey. Because every time I encounter a beautiful tradition, a moving piece of music, a meaningful place, or a story of resilience, I’m reminded of something essential:

Pain may be part of the human story.

But that is not the whole story.

What endures is our ability to create meaning, preserve beauty, care for one another, and build bridges across time, culture, and distance.

And while I know I won’t find the perfect culture or community, or become an expert on belonging, I know a lifelong exploration of the human experience is worthwhile. And perhaps, along the way, discover that belonging isn’t something we find once and for all.

Maybe it’s something we practice.