Growing Up

We all have to grow up, at some point. We take on new responsibilities, new challenges, and duties of care. It can be terrifying leaving the nest. Early on I learned life was tough, and I can be a khara. I carried this weight later on when I was alone enough to feel it. Children can be irritating little doochebags but they also have a wonderful sense of freedom that most adults end up selling for some sort of compensation or another. From time to time, everyone loses themselves to the drudging inertia of efficiency, of a predictably monotonous life. We take on our suitcases, cigarettes, or weapons of choice and slash away at the precious little time we have in this Oasis under the Sun. We lose our breathing hearts, our spirits of adventure, of playfulness! We lose looking forward to our days, wishing the night would stall its arrival. We grow distant from our hearts and learn to forestall or shun our hearts' temperance to a more convenient time. When you shun the pain of falling down enough times, hearts turn cold, they calcify and grow numb to our own pain just as much as the pain of others; numb to our joy too. Hearts grow circuit boards for ventricles, stretch out wires for veins, and lay out transistors for aortas. 

Mechanical hearts for mechanical people, whose artificially encoded natures have been pre-conceived by the Machine they serve. Winnie the Pooh once said “doing nothing often leads to the best something”. As opposed to being empty, I believe Pooh is talking about the optimistically limitless potential that nothing carries. We all have to grow up, the trouble is making sure we don’t leave the child in every one of us behind. That we don’t neglect or shame these ever-living sparks of freedom into docility and lose our joy in life to obscurity or utility. Our essence is the core to the rings that grow around our tree-trunks, the place we find peace in, where our heart was born, and the name we came into this world with. The core of our being is where we feel and emerge from, the heart is the center because it is always rooted in its affective, relational, and naturally authentic truth; whether we offer dirt or pearls. Our roots stretch further than just our own history, our own neatly separable plot of soil that tells us who we are. The roots of our hearts touch, co-depend on for support, communicate, and are entangled with not only the roots of our community of hearts, our people; they stretch far across the globe, to all living, breathing communities of organisms depending on the Sun. In fact, our roots dig down to a much more profound and originating Source of Light too.