we're social creatures by nature. not quite pack animals any more, but many of our cultures were at their best when living intergenerationally or in tribes. and why is that? because part of our growth comes from giving and receiving with each other.
these days, friends and family are blown to the four corners of the earth. when we do have those rare chances of finding people we truly connect deeply enough with that we can carry on meaningful and growth-inducing conversations with, they usually live across town, across the country or around the world. these moments do not come effortlessly as often as we need them to. we rely on technology to help us achieve it, but those come without the perks of eye contact, human touch, or the warmth of an embrace at a much needed moment. so our growth is stunted. we need these exchanges to grow, we need full sun, but we've placed our pots in the shade of the distance between us, so our roots don't go down as deeply as they should, our stalks grow thinner than is healthy as we stretch yearningly toward that warmth & light we don't get enough of.
tonight, i had the thinned out version of one of those conversations, watered down by the medium of Google chat, a conversation 8 months later than it should have been on the last time we saw each other in person, by mere virtue of the fact that we live 100's of miles apart. if we lived in the same camp, bathed in the same river every morning, gathered wood for the same cook fire and cooked over it each night, we would have discussed this already. but anwyay...
tonight my friend C and i talked about our relationships. she was talking about a recently ended love affair, how she'd lost herself in it, and what she was doing to find herself again. i shared some tidbits of wisdom wrought from my own rendition of that same experience, which i've repeated several times in my life so far. i'm about 3 years older than C. i shared with her my two cents, and then after we stopped chatting, i realized how sharing those insights with her was giving me so much to reflect on for myself at this point in my life. and it was then that i realized that by sharing our wisdom together, we teach both ourselves and the other person at the same time. we grow together. and think how much more quickly we would grow to be strong healthier adult plants if we did this more regularly for each other? if we'd had this conversation 8 months ago, how much further along in our own self-discovery would both of us be?
we think in this civilized modern age, we are so much further along than our tribal ancestors. i beg to differ. i think we lost about what (or more than) we gained when we forced our "civilization" upon our forebears and stripped the tribe from the tribesmen.
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what i shared with C tonight was that sometimes when you've been not yourself, you need to return to the place where you found yourself in the first place. for her, and for me, that place is Santa Barbara. well, for me, it was first Nashville, then Santa Barbara. i lost myself when i went to Iowa, had to go back to Nashville to look for pieces, then continued here to SB to find the rest of me, the whole me. a few times now, i've left (to San Diego and Portland), both times chasing something that wasn't me, and i had to return here.
and now, i am here and never really plan to leave. i tell myself it's because i want to give my daughter roots and somewhere stable to call home, rather than the constant moving around my parents gave me as a "foundation". but tonight, after chatting with C, i wonder if i am merely digging my heels in and staying here is because i am scared to death of losing myself again?
see, tonight, i shared my insights with C, she found them helpful, and then in turn, i also helped myself to dig a little deeper into my own path and my place on it at the moment. and i'm sure when C has more to share with me next time, it will reciprocate back to her as well. but i sure hope it doesn't take 8 months again...we're not getting any younger!
Simply place botanical on a hard-boiled egg, wrap with nylon pantyhose, tie snugly:
Then dip the wrapped eggs in any kind of dye you like. We used traditional Paas dye from Kmart, my friend R went way cool and made her own natural onion skin dye. Both turned out beautifully!
See my Flickr page for more photos.
