From Dirty City to Farming, a Story of Evolution
I recently took a trip home to visit family in Upstate New York. It broke me out of my work routine and granted me a new perspective. I have been living in Oregon for almost two and a half years, and had only visited home once after the first six months.
I didn’t know any one out here and had to build friendships from the ground up. This was not easy, but I had been through much worse with my longtime ex-partner and the drug scene. Coming from theses dark places fostered within me a resilience that I have called upon ever since.
I took note of the contrast in my life today, and the dirty city that I came from. I will do my best delineate both and the journey in-between.
Our stories are important not only to us, but they are valuable when shared with other. There are reasons for joy and gratitude when we recognize how far we’ve come, and if we are still in places of great suffering, the stories of others can give us hope and inspire us to action that betters our lives.
Agency and authorship are key concepts; we have the agency to make choices out of our individual free will and therefor can be the authors of our own lives.
The city I grew up in was an old town along the Erie Canal, one of the flourishing locals of 100 years ago. As history would unfold, the railroads took precedence as an important means of transportation of people and goods, leaving the canal systems behind.
There is also the story of the lake on which this city is located. At one point, it was the most polluted lake in America (It has since had billions funneled into it as a superfund site, but that’s another issue). This history contributed to the milieu that weighs preponderantly on person of a highly empathic nature.
According to one website, this city’s economy is said to be has the worst out of 100 large cities and is on the top 10 list for highest poverty rates. There are a lot of disenfranchised people living in anomie of all socioeconomic classes leading to a high rate of drug and alcohol use (aka escapism).
This is where I’ll begin my own story, so inextricably linked with everything around me. My parents were fundamentalist Christians and I was homeschooled until sixth grade. I exhibited distress as an early teenager as an expression of the world around me, along with an anger for not seeing others do something about it.
The pain consumed me, I found a temporary “peace” in drugs and sex, but it was fleeting.
I was naïve and un-empowered, and at 18 I began a 7 year relationship that completely destroyed me. In the aftermath I began searching for meaning and who I was. I found a myriad of pieces in countless places… In the mountains and rivers, in the souls of lovers, in flowers, in biology, in meditation…
I became shattered through coming close to death at 26 where I experienced a dissolution of the ego and fell upward into everything. Nothing was how I thought it was, all the thread came apart, and the walls came crashing down. I was not separate from the all that exist.
This was an extremely difficult experience and served as my archetypal rite-of-passage. Naked and newborn-like, I had to build myself up out of the ashes of what had burned down.
My journey, (the journey?) is a continual state of becoming. I can perceive “me” as localized around my physical body or let go of the notion completely in flow states of dance, music, meditation, and the natural world. Here I am, right now, recognizing the unlikeliness of my life, of life, and of the evolution of all things to lead of the present state.
I wanted to farm, to find connection with the world around me. This is what I am doing. I brought this state about by traversing the unknown from where I was in that dirty city to this place. I put one foot in front of the other and found a path. This is what we can do to change our lives from utter chaos to habitable order.
Where do you want to be? What can you do today, tomorrow, and next month to move toward that goal? Many don’t have a clue what we want, or why we are here. Kindness to oneself and others and a daily meditation practice are good places to begin.
Blessings on your journey!
Love ad infinitum,
Jalina
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