Graft:
verbgerund or present participle: grafting
- 1.insert (a shoot or twig) as a graft.”it was common to graft different varieties onto a single tree trunk”
- 2.MEDICINE transplant (living tissue) as a graft.”they can graft a new hand onto the arm”
As I look upon the world today I am reminded of the Tree of Life. Not any specific version of it past the totality of the human presence. I am pulled to the metaphysical, and the spirituality that I have grown over recent years. The world will indeed change, it has changed, and it will hold a different place for millions if not billions of people. The functioning of society will hold new, pointed dangers, a very different reality will be pushed onto our everyday existence. Sometimes the huge changes happen when you least expect them, when you are unprepared to climb that tree. The same thing applies to those inner changes as well.
This is where I caution though, this is where I say that this piece is about myself. This is the point in which the preface was necessary for my own memory’s sake. Chock full of metaphysical and feelings, the medium that I seem to be, and the questions of what the heck? Sometimes when writing, the ideas are all there, there appears to be nothing wrong. Yet over months and months I have had a blocking of publishing. Afraid to put some more pointed things out there because I don’t know what people like about my writing? What they don’t like? I don’t know the subjects that interest people, or the ones that flow properly or not. I started this blog to see if I was really a writer? Or just a coddled friend or loved one? After all this time, sadly my answers aren’t there, the contemplation of deleting it all weighs on my mind.
I have much in this world, and I am grateful for that. The aspect that I don’t have is people who understand the long talk, the bigger speaking that comes out. Because, for some reason I abhor small talk, I dislike the loose edges of dangling participles, intentions left in mid air, and coded innuendos. In this, I realized that my writings were actually my long talk, my attempt at dumping some of the intellectual processes I have pent up inside. I don’t speak to many people at all, this is because of my introverted nature, and the glaring feedback that people don’t care for me. It is in the spoken word that I am inherently too long winded, with lack of filters, filled with misplaced trust, and sensitivities I cannot turn off. The biggest challenge is how to take the long talk, and make it smaller, simpler, and less time consuming… When I fail to do that, the words just become stupidly sounding babble, incomprehensible, and painfully uncomfortable. Which of course leaves me highly self conscious about it. A vicious circle that leaves writing as my medium of choice.
Recovery, with all of the above hanging over my experience has also been a more singular process than what I hear in others stories. That was the other reason for creating this page. Writing was always a form of therapy, typing the thoughts out often makes things clearer, I see where my mistakes were made, or where the juxtaposition of my thinking took a header off the cliff. It allows me to see progress from one state of being, one manic mindset to another, the places where I need more work, and the methods to do that work. When I was very ill in the beginning of this recovery I had a choice to make. I could give in to the despair and poor me attitude that came along with a life changing illness, or I could move past that sickness too. I chose to do the latter. It is still a work in progress, work that is so dynamically personal, I must delve into it again and again, by myself.
All of this has come into a sharper focus of late. The necessity of adding my voice to anything at all has been replaced with… why? That is not a nod to the low self esteem as much it is a gaining of acceptance, a gaining of the knowledge that I am just a tiny voice screaming into the din. Also an understanding that I am no different than the others like me who have found something to cultivate comfort in their existence, writing was mine. I have found that it is not uncommon for some folks to take up writing, just like counseling as a career choice after cleaning up. Yes, this blog, page, thought repository, was about finding answers, of which I have shared many. They are not the answers that I had hoped for, but there I go again with my expectations.
I have no idea if this is just a waste of time, some kind of keep busy while hiding from life, or the passion it feels like at three a.m.? Life has definitely taken me to a few new vantage points over the last year. The growth has been gladly accepted, and gratefully applied. Where these words will take me is not up for me to decide, having never being worth any monetary value. On that note I will come to an end, the blowing off of personal fears, and the pruning of angst is sometime necessary to clear the paths of the mind. All in all a good practice to practice when life leaves you with new branches to develop as it is grafting the tree.
One response to “Grafting the Tree”
No armored prow can smash through a cloud of ideas. A vital idea brandished before the world at the right moment like the mystic banner of Judgment Day can stop a fleet of battleships. Nations that remain strangers must rush to know one another, like soldiers about to go into battle together. Those who once shook their fists at each other like jealous brothers quarreling over who has the bigger house or who owns a plot of land must now grip each other so tightly that their two hands become one. Those who took land from a conquered brother —a brother punished far in excess of any crime—and who, under protection of a criminal tradition, smeared their swords in the same blood that flows through their own veins must now return their brother’s land if they don’t want to be known as a nation of plunderers. A man of honor does not collect a debt of honor in money, at so much per slap. We can no longer be a village of leaves fluttering in the air, crowned in flowers, creaking and buzzing under the caress of capricious sunlight or thrashed and felled by tempests. The trees must line up to block the giant in his seven-league boots. The hour to muster and march in unison is upon us and our ranks must be as compact as the veins of silver in the depths of the Andes.