Softer Still

I don’t know what I want to write, because it’s all still a jumble in my head, but I felt it important to get it down because the moments of clarity and peerless thought do not linger these days.
I lie awake this morning thinking, as I often do because at some point in the day my brain decides that I’ve had enough sleep, whether it be 4 or 5 hours, and begins to embark on a personal journey inward to find every personal fault I have and then break it open to see what’s inside.
I have always been odd. When I was a child, I did what I believed was right, and I did it whether other people liked it or not. I made friends with the oddballs, the outcasts. I joked about science and philosophy. What 8 year old kid makes jokes about science and philosophy?
I kept trying to do right by what people told me. I was told not to act weird, I was pushed to stay inside lines I didn’t like, but eventually I became quite proficient in doing as I was told, because I wanted people to like me. I was a teacher’s pet, I was the favored student, I was the egghead, the bookworm, the nerd. All I wanted was friends, but friends didn’t want me.
As a child, I thought the world could be easily explained, because fact was fact. Knowledge was knowledge. I was naive enough to believe these things to be immutable, that they should remain the same forever and a day, and even then show no signs of wear or age.
One of my failings since childhood has been my drive to move forward and do something whether other people like it or not, as long as I thought it was something that needed to be done. Oh, when I was younger I would worry about being called wrong, or being told I was mistaken. That desire to be liked, to be loved, filled me with anxiety. It is one thing to do what you believe is right and have the support of the people around you. It’s another to do it and wonder if they’ll still like you the next morning.
I’m an adult now, and people like me. Not everyone, of course. You cannot be loved by everyone, because not everyone has the capacity to love people the way they want to be loved. Sometimes people hate you, and in their hearts they are justified in hating you. It is something you have to come to terms with, even if it doesn’t make any sense.
That doesn’t mean you stop loving them, just that you shouldn’t expect the welcome wagon to roll out if they ever see you in person.
Anyway, so people like me. If you ask them why, some might say they find me funny, others might like my social advocacy. There are a precious few who love my weirdness. They know I’m not quite lined up with the way the universe works, and they appreciate that.
I like them, too. I like all of you, even if you don’t like me. It’s not some “I’ll like you whether you like it or not,” thing, and it’s certainly not a “you can be a horribly cruel person and I’ll give you smiles and sunshine no matter what you do.” It’s the kind of consideration I give everyone. Even if I don’t know you, you are not a “stranger” to me. You’re not an enemy. That is what it means.
It means that no matter what others think of you, no matter your reputation,where you come from, what they may say about you, I’m not going to throw you out on *their* word, because even though I like them, too, that doesn’t mean I have to take their opinion as edict. That is something I’ve slowly learned as I’ve matured.
Softer, softer still. My heart grows softer every day, my mind quieter.
I am a witch. I don’t wear black robes or tend to bubbling cauldrons. I don’t eat children, and not just because the fat content is ridiculously high, especially for someone my age who should be watching their weight.
I don’t place curses on people, or ride a broomstick. Good Goddess, can you imagine riding a broomstick while having hemorrhoids? If that mental image didn’t dissuade you, I don’t know what else would.
Even when I believed in Jesus, I worshipped the moon, and felt one with the earth. When you’re a kid, you do what your parents tell you to do, so I did. I prayed to Jesus, and I asked God to forgive me for things, and I truly believed that God would talk to me, and be a friend, and for a time I managed to keep that rolling, but I never heard from him. Sometimes, I thought I did, but it always ended up just being my conscience and its whispering.
I finally came clean to myself this past year, and embraced it, having stepped outside *all* of it and getting a good look at everything around me, and seeing just so much. So much, and I can’t even describe it to you. I could give you colors and shapes, forms and figures, but they wouldn’t even begin to tell you what I saw. I believe it’s unique for each person anyway, so I’m not even sure there would be any kind of common ground, or frame of reference upon which it could all be based.
All I can say is that the stronger my ties become with the earth, the slower time unfolds. I can feel long years become motes, decades become flashes. I look at the moon and I know she looks back at me. She sees me, just as she sees all of humanity. She has seen the rise of humankind, and I believe she will see its fall back into the dirt.
Softer, softer still.
I’ve began to lose the desire to be needlessly clever, the need for snark. I think we have enough people who are clever and snarky. I love them, too, with a few in particular who hold my heart hostage. They know who they are, even if they don’t. Yet I no longer feel the need to fill the empty spaces with words that only cause more division with the people I’m trying to reach.
I am unraveling years of programming, removing the social layer cake placed on top of me. Everything I have become in order to please and appease others who most likely meant well, but didn’t understand that I am an oddball. I am weird. I do not vibrate on the same plane as the rest of the universe. No one does, really, but while everyone vibrates differently, I’m not wearing any pants while I do so.
I don’t hate people. I don’t want people to get sick. I don’t want them to die. I don’t care for the acquisition of wealth and power, and only use either because in the social construct I’m part of, they crave it, so if I want to get anything done, I have to use it, much as I hate to do so because it is always exclusionary to someone.
I’m not sure where I’m supposed to be, or what I’m supposed to be doing beyond what I think is what I should be doing and where I should be going. I’m proud of me for figuring that out. Having multiple nervous breakdowns over the course of a handful of months should at least net something worthwhile, after all.
Yet through all of this I haven’t broken my stride. I still want to help. I am both broken and repaired. A concert hall with the front rows ripped apart, but plenty of room up in the balcony for everyone to enjoy the show. Pardon the dust.
The roots of the earth wrap around me. She won’t let me go, and I don’t want her to let me go. The gossamer tendrils of silver moonlight touch me, and I wish them to continue touching me. The earth puts the air in my lungs, and the moon supplies me with the wisdom to keep breathing, and she whispers to me: softer, softer still.