The free soul in motion
There's 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've never really identified with the need to choose sides, nor with the desire to declare myself part of a specific category.
I don't feel at home with labels like "new age." Nor fully within any single tradition. Atheism is what I identify with least of all.
What I believe in doesn't follow a consistent model, but it's true for me. It needs to accommodate more than one tone, more than one language, more than one way of understanding the world. And one doesn't exclude the other. It never has for me.
Yet, that's often what's expected: that you should choose, streamline, explain yourself. 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 deeply rooted the either-or seems to be in many people, regardless of their belief system? As if security requires boundaries. As if meaning is only allowed if it follows a map.
Most of us carry multiple 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 immutable, 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 sustains me exist where there is space – without turning it into an identity.
Perhaps that's precisely what's disturbing 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 my inner self breathe.
Is that why my position can be perceived as controversial, without any "labels"?
What I myself experience is that this is why the need to categorize feels alien. Direction is there and moving - by living and letting things coexist.
So I continue to write - to stay in touch with what's happening.
© by HerMine’s