new year, happy

and all the lives we ever lived

and all the lives to be

are filled with trees and changing leaves

-Virginia Woolf

A couple of years ago my friend Darrelle started a blog. To introduce us readers to her story, she begins by talking about roots. She shares about her life in Colorado, about what it means to be from a place, and also what it means to leave that place. How we are born in and leave and return to geographical and metaphorical places (and relationships) in our lives.

Roots grow. Leaves change color. Branches must be pruned. A tree becomes unrecognizable from a seedling. And yet without the seedling, there would be no tree.

I am talking about identity. You are older, but you are the same. At any given point in the line, the spiral, the web, the building, you are either becoming more yourself, or less yourself.

For me, being from Washington means so many things.

Familiarity with Salish words and names, the normality of seafood, salmon, and berries, taking ferries regularly, dirty cars and teeming gardens, composting and rain, seasons and driving, Asian food and earthquakes. Mountain houses and evergreen trees.

I think of the island town of my birth and the Upper Columbia of my adolescence, now the vineyards and Blue Mountains of Walla Walla.

Chacos and Birkenstocks, dirty feet and snowshoeing, Indian reservations and long summer nights, the drive-in, bow-hunting and fly-fishing, ground wheat berries and sprouted grains, homemade wine and beekeeping, the Kootenais and the Salmo Priest, Quillisascutt Valley and all the orchards along the river.

And woven into these northwest roots the language of Santa Barbara’s beaches and Westmont, beloved; the self-assurance of San Francisco walking; wide-eyes of London exploration and burly glares of self-protection learned in Tegucigalpa and along Honduran trails.

I think about where I’ve come from and each stage I’ve passed through even while remaining the same. Stretching and growing and expanding but being essentially the same person, the same species of tree.

Each step is a stone of sorts, a stepping-stone. Or how could we get to where we are going? How could we miss steps but keep on with the journey? That would not work. I am grateful for Telford’s class, as it helped prepare me for living in San Francisco. I am grateful for coming back to Santa Barbara after working as a chaplain and wondering what the hell was happening to me, not being able to process anything, struggling to put words to those experiences from General Hospital.

And it is has stuck with me, what he said about not judging or looking down on who you have been, not looking back to think with relief, ‘I’m so much cooler now,’ and sensing your earlier self a stranger. We must learn to be okay with the places we have been, the roads we have walked, the scenes carved into our eyes. And not only okay, but richer and kinder for them.

Where you are now, there will come a day when you also want to write that off. You are not where you will be! And that is okay too. Karen always talked about chronological snobbery, about the need to be patient with others, to remember, as Brad said, that people are rarely where they will end up. Gentleness, gentleness, in all interactions.

Because sometimes the lack of manifest empathy makes me sick to my stomach. But even this must be forgivable, for empathy only comes from walking in the hardness. And some walk flatter, not better or worse, paths.

This 23^rd year was my golden birthday, and to be honest, it has been a painful year, marked with loss. If you know me, you know I love gold—earrings, rings, headbands, scarves, glitter—and this year really has held none of that.

But then maybe that is what it means to become gold—to walk through fire, and come out purified. Well I do not claim purification, though I have seen so many things held dear crumble into ash at my feet. And I will say that of transformation, like alchemy, I know no other way than to walk through flame.