Not Popular? No matter …

Life is not a popularity contest. Beyond high school, if this continues to be a focus, we are woefully vulnerable to filling our lives with whatever comes, as long as it plies to our egos. Before we know it, we are elderly and discover to our amazement that we have nobody who really cares; no one with whom we can share our deepest thoughts and fears; none who can truly comfort us. When we finally seek meaning in a life full of pomp and fluff, we are then distinctly at a disadvantage.

Growing up in southern California, life was very much like a popularity contest. If one were thin, preferably blond and fairly liberal with one’s affiliations, life moved along much as well oiled cogs in a gear. My own hair, when I didn’t iron it out flat, was kinky, reddish, and slung down below my shoulders, resting on large latissimus dorsi, doubtless Creation’s way of urging me back to the evolutionary waters from which we all emerged. Perhaps these muscles alone were a sign for me to dive deep, to never settle for what I found on the surface of things. As an avid swimmer, I discovered the deeper I dove, the clearer the waters became. Pond scum had never really been my thing, after all.

With wide hips and an uncertain manner, I felt oddly fashioned in a fashion-conscious environment. Not to say I didn’t try to fit in – lord knows I did. But it was not in the cards I was dealt to continue on that trajectory. Thankfully a little seed in the form of an embolism was growing in my left lung, product of the chock-full-of-hormones birth control pills dispensed like Pez candies at the free clinic. After a near death experience, a month in hospital and nineteen years of living in a smog-enshrouded city, I fled as far from where I stood to the utterly unknown New England woods where I was to spend the next 32 years of my life.

It must have taken all of those 32 years to dislodge what was no longer useful from my upbringing. In its place, I cultivated a lifetime bond with nature and all living beings. I learned to sit with myself, trembling at first from the sheer chaos encountered therein. Hours spent on giant granite boulders and our quiet lakeside dock grounded me to the earth, perhaps for the first time. I observed as eagles and osprey, great blue herons and loons arrived and flew off with the seasons. Tiny details in discernment taught me the difference between a raven and a crow. All manner of furry creatures crossed my path at one time or another.

I learned how to survive by sifting meaning from the detritus of existence. Living on the edge of an ever-impending winter, discovering pleasure in simplicity, I ultimately left the city in me behind, and began growing roots deep enough to anchor well into this life. I failed to care what current fashion swept the country. My trendsetting days were behind me. It no longer made a difference who my friends were, save one good human being to whom I could truly relate, aside from my life partner. My creativity settled into the rhythm of existence, of beasts, of home and hearth and family. And though I have been scarred from some tough lessons, those marks, invisible to the naked eye, forever remind me never to take for granted what it took to get here, to this place. What I carry with me to the end will be of inner value, nothing less will matter.

 

Goose Pond