“Being Ourselves”

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment” Ralph Waldo Emerson

A couple of years ago I challenged myself to write a poem a day during the advent season. For some of the poems it was simply about writing something as opposed to writing nothing. I could tick the box and say I did it. When I look back over the few lines I am amazed that sometimes they are not just lines at all, to fill a space, but they contain a truth.

Heaven’s King

Heaven’s king comes down

Jesus at ease in His skin

touches a leper

I love that phrase “at ease in His skin”. There are too many surveys and polls around that reveal how much we are not really at ease in our skin. There is too much out there in the world presenting us with images that we rarely match up to. We are not allowed to be at ease in our skin unless it is size zero and blemish free.

Today I met with the “Poetry in Motion” crew to explore what it means to be ourselves. They were running a series of workshops around the Highlands as a part of the 2017 Mental Health Arts Festival. The venue was the Glenurquhart Library in Drumnadrochit, just off to the right of Loch Ness before you hit Urquhart Castle on the left. Amazing building.

There were a couple of warming up exercises and a fistful of prompts to play with. We are the sum of all the places we have ever visited, the memories that we hold inside, our hopes and dreams, the people whose lives we have touched and what floats our boat or sinks it. Who we are isn’t always what people see us to be.

There is a spiral staircase in the library that leads to desks littered with computers and a panoramic window that looks out onto the distant hills. A couple of banners hang from the ceiling. Two words decorate them “stones” and “people”. I didn’t consciously think about either word but they must have registered somewhere in the creative part of my brain.

I did Geography “O” Level at school. In my day it was not human Geography as in towns and cities and pollution and poverty. It was the structure of the landscape – mountains and valleys, rivers and rainfall. I fell in love with the word “isthmus” and I knew that Fort William had the highest level of rainfall never thinking I would ever visit the place.

As I looked through the window of the library I wished I could remember all I had been taught about how the mountains came to be like that. It was something to do with glaciers and the ice age and plate tectonics – the movement of earth’s crust, sometimes pulling away, somethings pushing together and piling up.  There’s a limit to how much we can play around with the landscape to make it do what we need to when it comes to roads and railways. We seek out the natural passes rather than blast our way through. We tend to build according to the contours.

That’s the landscape – the “stones” but what about the "people"?

It didn’t seem to be a difficult jump to start thinking about people and how they got there. Not how they got there according to evolution or the birds and the bees of sex education. (Remind me to tell you about the trains and the tunnels and dropping off presents). How people got there as in how they ended up living the lives they live and the internal firing of thoughts and feelings. Is there a human equivalent of plate tectonics and glaciers that shape and form us?

Over a cup of tea we talked about how much of being ourselves is written in our DNA and how much we are shaped by our environment. Philosophy on a Saturday morning! It really was an interesting discussion with no right or wrong answers.

We settled down to write something inspired by our notes and observations.

Shaped

landscape shaped and formed

by wind and weather

the earth’s crust shifts

sometimes pulling away

sometimes piling up and over

mountains and valleys fashioned

rock, soil and lochs

ice age evidence

too much to dismantle

we build beside or near

curbed by contours

people shaped and formed

by family, friend and foe

the heart’s crust shifts

sometimes love bestowed

sometimes love withheld

our joys and sorrows fashioned by

words spoken, or swallowed

too much to dismantle?

we fight or surrender to our DNA and

build who we want to be