WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE HUMAN AND ALIVE (prompt taken from a friend’s webinar)
I can’t answer that question I can only respond to what it is for me, not what it means. And I can only respond from a septuagenarian perspective knowing at any other age I would have responded differently.
Sarcastically I want to remark that it is the opposite of being human and being dead. But unlike earlier knowing, I have no knowledge of being dead. Is dead even human?
I am time. Time fleeting. If I am of nature, and I mostly agree that I am, I have yet to embrace myself, fully. I continue to separate myself from whom I am, only observing the earth, the sky, the flowers mostly, and the trees, the ants, the spiders-but never the worms.
Although not yet dead, I do go dormant. I shed, like leaves in the fall, my outer shell, my façade. A thinning of too many possibilities. Each spring hope blossoms, never the same but always with intention. Alive with direction, with bounty, with beauty-with kindness, with compassion, with joy.
With fear and anxiety.
With fear and anxiety.
To be human is to be vulnerable; I allow myself to be vulnerable. Vulnerability is my sign that I am alive. Vulnerability is risk, is challenge—it’s letting go (despite the fear, the anxiety); it’s escaping the rabbit hole-over and over again.
To be alive. I am alive always. Alive: aware, conscious, striving, seeking. I am not necessarily knowing, but always in pursuit of knowledge. I am loving, embracing, grieving. I am dancing. I am praying.
I am alive and human as time separates me from the past, gains quickly on me to a future which will have no answers. “I might be stardust” I might become a star. From dust we came to dust return is a parable of the earth, but I dream sky, I dream sun and moon and stars.
Like morning glories, I sleep, I wake—a continuum. Invasive, maybe, to some, but I declare it’s the life cycle reaching and pulling, and connecting–and in winter, like leaves disappear so do the flowers (in Minnesota anyways), but they return faithfully in the spring.
Diversity makes me human, makes me alive, makes me who I am: an earthling perhaps born on a yet to be discovered planet.
Sherry Lee
8/26/24
