The free soul in motion
There is a type of question that comes up again and again. Not always explicitly stated, but clear in its own way.
Are you this – or that?
I have never truly identified with the need to choose a side, nor with the desire to declare allegiance to a category.
I don't feel at home with labels like "new age." Nor entirely within any single tradition. Atheism is what I identify with least of all.
What I believe in doesn't follow a consistent model but is true for me. It can encompass more than one tone, more than one language, more than one way of understanding the world. And one does not exclude the other. It never has for me.
Yet, that is often what is expected: that one should choose, purify, explain oneself. As if faith, meaning, and inner life are only valid if they are categorizable and easy to name.
Is that how life works?
Isn't it strange how strongly the either-or seems to be rooted in many people, regardless of their form of belief? As if security requires boundaries. As if meaning is only allowed if it follows a map.
Most of us carry several layers simultaneously, somewhere between what we grew up with and what we are still exploring. Is it then really necessary to be forced to choose between different forms of some unmoving, fixed belief? Why isn't it enough for me?
I who do not believe in order to belong. I who do not belong in order to believe. I who let what carries me exist where there is space – without making it an identity.
Perhaps that is precisely what is disruptive in a world that wants to categorize – that someone neither takes a stand against nor preaches for. That someone says, without drama: I am here as I am.
Even as a child, I read books so often, so much, so intensely that my mother had to "throw me out" of my room to be a child and then a teenager "for real." Since I could think and write, I have written my way through what is happening within and around me to let my thoughts settle. To let the inner breathe.
Is that why my position can be perceived as controversial, without all the "labels"?
What I myself experience is that this is why the need to categorize feels foreign. Direction exists and moves – by living and letting things coexist.
So I continue to write – to stay in touch with what is happening.
© by HerMine’s
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