I have been struggling lately

with my own sense of connection, and with aspects of my own humanity, and with how these things relate.

When I was a child, I awoke one night wrapped in my blanket and sheet. I had tossed and turned and was wrapped so tightly I thought I would never escape.

I enjoy the wholeness of a long embrace.

I yearn for affection of any kind. I yearn for connection.

I yearn to be seen and accepted for who I am, without the constraints of expectations that have been placed upon me either by society or by those closest to me, or at least by what I thought was expected of me.

I wish, like any other creature, to be wild. I'm a being of starlight, as we all are, and I want to shine.

Writing in her journals during her youth, Virginia Woolf mused,

"I think I see for a moment how our minds are all threaded together – how any live mind today is of the very same stuff as Plato's & Euripides. It is only a continuation & development of the same thing. It is this common mind that binds the whole world together; & all the world is mind."

Every glass of water you drink contains molecules that were once part of, and passed through, the dinosaurs. We are made mostly of water. We eat plants who eat starshine. We are the dinosaurs, we are the plants, we are all starshine.

Chickens are also dinosaurs, as are all birds. I see them as tiny beautiful raptors stalking as I sit on the garden swing. I wonder if the chickens imagine themselves as wild and untamed.

I've written before that I wasn't raised with affection. In my yearning, my heart bursts with the anxious cries of a lost child. Of a neglected child. Of an abandoned child.

My partner works with beautiful intention to design the garden around my enjoyment.

I project my insecurities, my deepest fears.

In so many ways, I am still that lost, abandoned child.

I yearn to be understood, and to be loved on the basis of that understanding. I yearn to trust that love.

I remember the sheets wrapped around me. I need to breathe.

I clutch tightly, too tightly, to those I love.

I spoke to the stars last night, my sisters, as I do most nights.

Life has been turbulent lately. Beautiful as can be, but turbulent. And messy. My sisters know this.

But so beautiful.

When the clouds cover the night sky, I feel disappointment. I miss my sisters. I feel our connection, but I miss the light that they shine upon my heart. When I search for them and can't find them, I feel the separation of distance in ways that otherwise escape me. We are no more distant when the clouds obscure our light, though I feel the distance differently.

Yet, I know that the clouds will clear and we will see each other again. Our vibrations echo into all directions of eternity.

We ever dance together. I know this and I am content.

On another night, under an opaque sky, I still speak to the stars, but briefly, and as if I am writing a postcard. I'm still here, sisters, and I love you. I'll see you soon when the clouds have passed their way. I look forward to the glimmer of your smiles shining upon my face, and I'll reflect mine upon yours.

We reach out with invisible tendrils that link us across, and perhaps even outside of, space-time.

We are still connected.

I don't ever forget that time is an axis, and somewhere along that axis, we are still whole, and someday we may embrace again.

Turbulence.

Tolstoy once asked,

"In the name of what love are we to sacrifice another love? Whom shall we love more, to whom do more good, — to the wife or to the children, to the wife and to the children or to the friends? How are we to serve [others], without impairing the love for wife, children, and friends? How, finally, am I to decide the question how much I may sacrifice of my personality which is needed in the service of others? How much must I care for myself, in order that, loving others, I may be able to serve them? All these questions seem very simple for men who do not attempt to give themselves an account of the feeling which they call love; but, far from being simple, they are completely insoluble."

Turbulence can be frightening when soaring across the sky, but it turns out that turbulence is not actually that dangerous.

I don't forget, however, that our perceptions shape our realities.

Last night, I thanked my partner for their patience and generosity of care while I have been turbulent of late. I've placed expectations on them, too. This is something I have had to learn about us, and the lesson has been hard won. We've shaped ourselves for each other and for the expectations we have placed on each other. It's a difficult habit to break, but we love each other, and we have both agreed to work on it. Both of us deserve to not shape ourselves for each other, but to be loved for who we are.

"I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."

-- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Lately, I often prefer the word partner to the word spouse. One word represents a singular choice I made long ago, when I was a very different person, when I was practically a child, a choice by which I am still bound, albeit without regret. The other word represents a perpetual choice I willingly and eagerly make each day, unbound, moment after moment, in each iteration of my existence.

I tend to ruminate.

I plan for catastrophe and I freeze as if the worst has already happened, even when I haven't even begun.

I ruminate on the things I have done, the person I should have been, the pain I have inflicted across a lifetime.

My favorite place to live is in the present, but I struggle to do so. The past and the future, those have made up my home. The present has always been merely a vacation.

I've been working on this.

For most of my life, in most of my relationships and interactions, with those I knew and strangers alike, I shaped myself in the ways that would give me the tolerance and affection I wanted, that I needed, so that I wouldn't feel alone, abandoned. I crafted a false version of myself fashioned out of other people's expectations.

I lost my own self in deference to a wholeness to which I felt I could conform.

"I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I will love you; if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

I dimmed my starlight. I thought this was necessary. I was taught it was necessary.

And in that darkness, it was very difficult for anyone to find me. And I was that lost child again and again.

My sisters remind me that I never should have learned that love is something to be earned. How could I have known?

"There is no love in the future: love is only an activity in the present. A man who does not manifest love in the present has no love."

-- Leo Tolstoy, On Life

I was bound by shackles I had placed upon myself. I lost myself repeatedly in a vicious cycle. I lost myself in the search for the embrace that would finally make me feel whole.

I needed embrace, and I was suffocated by my own sheet and blanket. What was meant to be warm and comforting caused me anguish.

Like any other creature, I want to be wild. Unbound. Untamed. Like any other star, I want to shine with my own light.

And I want to feel whole.

In My View of the World, Erwin Schrödinger states, "This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole."

I have been asking a question for longer than I can remember. I have been asking my sisters with the hope that they will remember.

We were once whole. Billions of years ago you and I and all of the stars embraced at the center of our cosmic ocean. Perhaps deep within yourself, you remember the feeling of that embrace.

Last night I asked again, as I often do,

Why did we leave that embrace?

They reminded me that there are no ends, only means, as if I, of all people, needed a reminder of this.

I needed a reminder of this.

And they reminded me that time is an axis, and that somewhere along that axis, there is a point where we are still whole.

But in a fraction of a second, we violently threw ourselves from that wholeness– why did we do this, and why are we so fractured on this point on the axis?

And they answered again.

My partner had already gone inside. I ran to find them. I brought them outside to be with the stars again, so we could all be together. I told them of what I learned.

I had been looking to our embrace at the center of the universe.

I was not looking to each of the stars, but only the collective, and the singularity we had been.

I was not looking to the person in front of me, nor to myself.

I was thinking only of the wholeness of that embrace.

I remembered the stars, and I remembered the embrace, but I forgot about the tentacles.

We are all still connected.

I am myself, but I am also an ecosystem comprised of innumerable discrete living entities. I am myself, but I am a tiny fraction of an organism that is comprised of all life on Earth, borne and part of the cosmic ocean itself.

We are bound by connections we cannot see which permeate the substance of everything. Whether by gravity, or quantum entanglement, by time, by our scars, or by our vibrations, or by the very fabric of existence itself, we bear the bonds of connections that cannot be broken. We were once whole, we are all still connected, and we may all embrace again.

Time is an axis. We exist along a multitude of points on that axis. On one point on the axis we still embrace. Time is not real, it is only a matter of perception. Our perceptions shape our realities. Perceptions can be shifted.

Energy and matter cannot be created or destroyed, and we are all infinite and infinitesimal manifestations of nothingness, vibrating ourselves into existence.

"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

-- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

We are linked by the very nature of our existence.

I remember the sheets wrapped around me. I need to breathe.

I clutch to those I love with the anxious cries of an abandoned child.

I project my insecurities.

We are all still connected.

I am not alone.

I relax. The blanket and sheet release their hold. I can breathe.

Perhaps we lost ourselves in a violent wholeness at the center of our cosmic ocean, and out of the same panic as a child tied up in blankets and sheets, we fractured and threw ourselves from each other.

Or maybe we remembered

that we are always connected, that we are whole in ourselves, not only in the singularity of our embrace, but as individuals.

And maybe we simply wanted to experience each other in ways that we can't as part of a whole. So that we could each give love, and so that we can all receive love.

And despite the healing beauty and wholeness of our embrace, perhaps we eventually felt more alone in our singularity than when we became individuals sharing in each other's company. Instead of being bound by singularity, we gave ourselves the space-time to breathe, and to choose each other, and ourselves, day after day, moment after moment.

Maybe we didn't violently throw ourselves away from each other.

Maybe we just needed to take a step back,

so that we could see each other

and ourselves.

no ends, only means