Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Global Citizen

I have heard it said that what we teach and bring to the world is that which we need for ourselves first and foremost. I believe it to be true.  My work being that of working to support, create and foster a sense of culture and community wherever I can, I can’t help but recognize the reality of the relevance.   I am so rich and so blessed in so many ways, with so many friends around the world, yet, in moments, I feel like I am the most lonely and alone person on the planet. 

My heart longs for something that feels always fleeting: a feeling of “belonging” with others that can really only come from family and culture.  I see it here everywhere.  The people know who they are, they know where they come from, they have a connection to their roots, to their community, to their families. They have roots that go back hundreds of generations that they are still in touch with every day.  Most of us in the good ol USA, simply don’t have that.  Many of us don’t even know where our grandparents came from, how they got here and what their roots were.  Often our grandparents don’t even know, the chords were cut and little was revealed. 

Add to that my path as a visionary and a lover of adventure and travel as a global citizen, and it’s as if somehow my path, as beautiful and noble as it is in many ways, also isolates me from the very thing that I seek.  My journey of exploring culture and community takes me away from mine.  My desire to experience the cultures of the world and to witness how they work somehow keeps me just on the outside of full belonging to any one particular and the one I was born into and raised by is not resonant with my soul, heart or mind really in any way. 

I am a loner in this world:  a self proclaimed, fully discovered lost, yet totally found, soul.  Enlightened in many ways, and fully connected, yet longing for something that “normal” people in the most poor of places seem to have that I can’t quite touch or grasp.  Something that I know I will never have, that is not mine to have and that I can only witness, borrow and admire in others.  

Somehow, being a woman, single, solo and carrying the torch that I do, with the passion for experience, knowledge and wisdom that I have, I have become a citizen of a different kind of community.  I am participating in the community of the entire world.  I wander, I watch, I listen, I am like a ninja warrior priestess in the city of the world on a lifetime quest for understanding humanity as a participant of many cultures.  I am, indeed, a global citizen.  I have home, friends, community and love everywhere, and yet at the end of the day, still I am alone.

My instincts are sharp, and I know how to take care of myself and others.  I can literally go anywhere in the world and feel like I can survive, thrive and find my way.  I’ve been described as brave, courageous and fearless and I know it’s all true.  I don’t have a lot of inhibitions.  I say and do as I please, when I want and I’m grateful that I was blessed enough to be born into a culture that does grant me, if nothing else, the freedom to create myself and my life as I please.  Even in my lonlieness, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Yet, in quiet moments, like now, sitting by the Malacon at sunset listening to the surf and watching the day come to a close, the tender soft place in me, as a woman, wants nothing more than the sanctuary of one good man to lean on and to take my hand.   A man who can let me collapse into him when I am sad, tired or just fed up with the whole crazy illusion we call life.  A man who can feel what my heart feels right now, and show up to pick me up, dry my tears, hold me and know exactly how to nourish me back to my source, quietly and with great strength and softness. A man who can stand up to my fire, but melt me with his tenderness.

I’m beginning to think he’ll never show up  and that the reality of what I must accept in this life is that indeed, I am here on a solo journey to touch the hearts and lives of many, but to walk always as one woman with a mission to find ways to offer to the world that which she doesn’t have in her own life.

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