The free soul in motion

There's a kind 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 pick a side, nor with the desire to declare allegiance to 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 the least.

What I believe doesn't follow a consistent model, but it is true for me. It can contain 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's often what's expected: that one should choose, purify, explain oneself. As if belief, meaning, and inner life are only valid if they are placable 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 belief system? 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 that enough for me?

I who don't believe to belong. I who don't belong to believe. I who let what sustains me exist where there is space – without making it 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 the inner 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 oneself feels alien. Direction exists and moves - by living and letting things coexist.

So I continue to write - to stay in touch with what's happening.

© by HerMine’s