I stand on a hill of craving, understanding and pleasing. I search for, and find awareness of my fears. My desire to please, to set my standards by the bar of others’ expectations builds the hill daily. It is a landfill of attachments; clinging to the shifting safety of connection to people I deem important and hold higher, more divine than myself. The more I know others, the less I know myself as I study, with hawklike attention, the faces of those I love for signs of my worthiness. I think I am climbing, but I am only fighting to maintain my ground.
Words like “success,” like “greatness,” and “achievement,” are the machines I have used to form these keepsakes into a semblance of structure. I inhabit them, and they inhabit me. The bedrock of my identity is laced with the impurities of my personal fictions. I must give up all to gain all. I must step outside the parameters of my fears; the little shack on the hill must crumble. I’ve tried to wrestle it down, but have only served to build it up.
I must embrace a new way.
Breathing in, breathing out, stirring up the warm, red air that swirls within and without my body, I strive to accept and let go. To release the trinkets of my identity; because without letting them go I cannot find the treasure of my true self. I envision the things that felt most solid in my life dissolving into chaff and blowing away in the wind. There is more below, I know. Things tacit and unexplored, things assumed to be true. The hill must burn to reveal the earth beneath.
But still, I imagine the earth rising to meet me through the rubble. As I stand on the cool, damp, soil, I sense the potential. I realize that self-knowledge begins with letting go. That true achievement, true greatness, can only come from the things that are born from my essence, in service of my authenticity. Not striving for anything but to honor my true nature, any successes will hang as fruit on the branches of my growing self. They will be consumed and enjoyed by myself and others, rather than the shifting foundation I thought I knew before. First though, I must dig deep. I must plant.
I imagine roots spreading from my feet into the earth, and I sense the intermingling of my self with that which has been bigger and a part of me all along. A seed waiting decades to germinate. And in that moment, I make a commitment, not to Grow, but to grow.
Valley, Mountain, Sky. 