Can We Miss Our Destiny?
May 2024
We may be the only species on earth who fundamentally denies who and what we are. I’ve been chewing on this a lot lately, and it has started to find me in conversations with friends and students.
I've taken to looking to the natural world to affirm or denounce my suspicions about things. Often looking to only the human made realm is murky- we rarely know how infiltrated we are by influence and conditioning, which began far before we arrived in this incarnation. Conditionings that have been passed down through ancestral lineages, in the story of the land, in the grasp of belonging.
The human condition at some point or another compels us into a question of understanding of the world around us, a question that can be conscious or unconscious. But either way, the mind grasps at a sense to make sense of it all, and most importantly, to place ourselves within it in a way that affirms meaning. And so, I try to understand the world around me by coloring in people and places, assigning them a value that makes sense to me in this fractured viewpoint of the world. Our minds in a vice grip, dividing and separating the world (and each other, and ourselves) into what is good and what is bad, into what is good, better, and best.
When I really sit with the plants, a different story unfolds. In my rambunctious backyard, full of overgrown and volunteers, I witness something.
My friend Alyssa is the one who introduced me to communing with the plant world, and showed me how to approach these earthen beings and understand their language. There is very much a conversation available to us, one that many of the plant and animal kin have been begging us to join.
Cleaver is a “weed” that has uproariously taken root in my yard over the years, but this one especially. Most people would tear it from their beds at the root or hack away at it where it grows wild against their shed. Generally speaking, most of us find no use for this sticky nuisance of a plant. It’s in the way, of no immediate or aesthetic value, so we discard it. Sometimes we even do so with disdain, it’s crowding out other plants, it’s rising up where it’s unwanted. Off with it’s head! So I wonder to myself, how does the cleaver experience itself? Who is it?
Contrary to the force of society, the rest of the natural world is not mentally dividing itself based on inherent goodness. The plants and animals and waters are not vying for their place in heaven, puffing themselves up with merit and do-goodness to prove their belonging. But they are witness to our great suffering as humanity hacks and divides itself, not only separating ourselves from people who we cannot find faith with, but the very parts of ourselves that are innately and intrinsically connected. We are tearing ourselves apart. Denying that there is something shared, denying that even for as different and variegated as we all truly are, that humanity as a whole shares something.
It isn’t always so in your face and out there though, this denial of who we are. Sometimes it speaks softly, or learns to speak in a voice that sounds so much like our own that we believe it our intuition telling us to change course, that there is no way we could possibly belong on the ground we are on. We deny who we are, what our gifts are, what our challenges are, what our purpose might be because we have found more ease in rejecting our own complexity than embracing it head on. Because how often does it all fit neatly into the box given to us by cultural norms? What space is there in the box for a late bloomer, a change of heart, a confrontation of values? The box, when we look at it from a vastu perspective, is the shape of earth, the unchanging and steady element. But square also insights conformity, falling into line, being in uniform with everyone and everything around you. And as far as I have seen, a truly soulful life cannot exist entirely in a box.
And I think that’s at the heart of the matter. The question isn’t really am I good enough or what will people think of me, but something far more vulnerable that lives curled up in the dirt beneath it. Hibernating, shying away from the harsh cold. The question is, am I willing to radically love myself and insist on living a soul led life? Our eyes dart back and forth to the box and the vast open wilderness- one holds a lot of certainty (and what we believe to be safety, belonging, happiness), one the embodiment of mystery. One holds who we think we should probably be, and the other is home to the stirrings of our soul, the joy of discovering who we already are. There are countless reasons we can find to build our home in the box, and many of them I have used to decorate and arrange my own little square. Making it cozy, telling myself that this box is actually different than all the rest. They are reasons that you know well in your body, reasons that have kept you up at night and have convinced yo to stay when you knew it was time to go. Reasons that have found you in the sick bed, reasons that came to find you when you felt a subtle unhappiness brewing deep within.
There is a sometimes popular saying that you “cannot miss your destiny”, and in some cases I would agree that it’s true. But over the years I have recognized that theres nuance, that perhaps we can’t entirely miss our destiny, but we certainly can reject it, deny it, and avoid it. That there will be parts of ourselves ripe for transformation, and rather than reaching into the hearth and forging the blade, we can leave it simmering in the flame, molten yet unchanged. We are not forced to wake up to life, even when the divine essentially shoves it in our face. I consider it an act of great love, the persistence of the divine to teach me certain lessons. For not all doors stay open forever, and within the natural world time is alive and is a force to be harmonized with. Maybe you won’t miss your destiny fully, but it’s quite apparent to me that it’s very well possible to leave cards on the table. Birth does not promise us a redemption story. That is one we get to write for ourselves.
The greatest redemption I have known, is the one of self love. To bring home all the parts of myself that I have kicked out of the house, taught a lesson by rejection, and the parts of me that I have cursed and cast out. The parts that I was so sure could not coexist within me. I separated myself not for my wellbeing, but for my perceived goodness, for my ticket into heaven. My inner critic certainly isn’t equipped to run the show, but she’s definitely not stupid. If I can give her the right job, I find that perhaps she can be the voice that helps to refine my discernment, that she can become flavored by the compassionate parts of me, that she can sit next to the curious and playful parts and learn how to work in concert.
Rather than deny who we are, we are given an opportunity in life to become fully ourselves. And fully ourselves, we can give to the world what we hope to find in it- beauty, creativity, truth, compassion, connection, healing.