Exploring the Depths
"It's STILL me!" (Little Richard)
I am a unique compilation of interrelated, conflicting and emergent qualities that gets better with age, much like fine whiskey. At my most basic, I am just a meta-system of about ten trillion bacterial cells and only about one trillion human cells, which is good to remember when I get too full of my self.
Carl Safina, one of my favorite authors, says it is our connections to others that truly make us individual, unique. This was a concept that rocked my loner soul at the time I read it. I had imagined this living, as my solitary journey, which is true to a point. You enter the light alone and depart to it alone but in between, ideally not so much. I looked at how I came to acquire all the threads that are me, and it was clear that the best, the irreplaceable unique threads came from other people who touched my life and left their lovely threads in my keeping, to weave into this tapestry of my life. It is a much more intricate, unique and colorful weaving than I could ever have achieved alone.
While I was still young and dream blind, I wanted roots; a sense of belonging to a place the way a tree belongs, with no need for luggage. My mother instead gave me a sense of movement. We relocated often, leaving just as roots might have formed. I spent a long time being aggravating baggage and did not appreciate the gifts my mother was offering or notice how much I learned moving in and out of place.
I knew eventually that I could live anywhere in the world, charades is a universal language. That getting lost could be disorienting or the first step in the right direction. People are largely as happy as they choose to be and expectation is the enemy of joy. Most places are beautiful and get more beautiful still if you have connections there. Only your people are irreplaceable. I have a fixed point of place now and my wished for roots and now when I think of roots and home, I do not see the land or our sturdy little home; I see my people’s faces.
I believe in magic, in fairies, in the power of love, and an individual’s ability to shape their world with the energy they generate, their choices. I believe it is better to be kind than right and that violence is never the answer. I love rain, plants, the ocean, and my family.
Someone I respect recently told me that to understand anything I needed to see its “big picture”. I am not entirely sure what my big picture is yet but so far it has been a wonderful experience being me and what I would like to be, above all things, is deeply grateful for the opportunity.