I must become comfortable in my unknowing, more adept at my unlearning—and perhaps too a kind of unbecoming*—growing into a rooted, earthy being who is not a label, an identity, or any kind of deliberate intention—but the process of myself : an exploration of instincts, animal urges, intuition, and all that is natural and wild—married to, dancing with, intellect and knowledge.
A wholeness is what I am, and have always been, self-contained within the porous shell that is my body.
As I grow older, I become more essentially myself.
I think this is part of the maturation process. Going from individualism, and a great emphasis on a sense of self and identity (through clothing, musical preferences and so on), to a more expansive sense of self that includes the land around me, and is therefore more organic. A stripped back, biological and ecological (though still human) identity, if you will, as opposed to a constructed, artificial one.
Myself as a root—of the land as the land is of me. Connected.
I gentle myself, kindling a kindness for what I have endured in life, and cannot yet face, or heal. My unbecoming will be my becoming.
*‘Unbecoming’ means ‘unflattering’, as well as ‘unseemly’ or ‘inappropriate’. Thus it seems quite an apt word for the subversiveness it suggests. I refuse to please, to be seemly or appropriate. I can only be myself.
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| Tree Sketch (Emergence), water-mixable oils and acrylics on oil sketch paper, 2012 |
your tree image made me think...unbecoming might be a kind of mirror image, a going back to the roots, which spread as far as the crown does, so it's said. as above, so below. our undoing was in our doing, so perhaps our salvation lies in undoing the doing! or at least in going back to the roots, to the source, to the place of divergence, which is also the place where unity begins... can we be just what we are, can we hold in mind simultaneously the root and the crown? in undoing, in unbecoming, can we find the wholeness of all that we are?
ReplyDeleteSo beautifully said. Thank you. I agree wholeheartedly.
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