Ariadne.

tl;dr – There is a lot of goddamned deep here. Fair Warning.

Ariadne [ˌærɪˈædnɪ]

(Myth & Legend / Classical Myth & Legend) Greek myth daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë: she gave Theseus the thread with which he found his way out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth

Roots.

I am close to my family, I am the middling child of four and therefore I am the weaver. I make contact & I serve as the go between. I knit together the edges made raw by our communal skeletons. I choose to bear witness to the growth of the 7 of us as we twist into the length of our lives. I made this choice unwillingly at first and then later, willingly.

Seven or eight individuals depending on how one counts it.

I choose seven.

One Mother. Two Fathers. Three Siblings. One oft forgotten stepmother would make 8.

I choose seven.

I used to tell people the 4 children are far too many for one family and what I meant was 4 children were far too many for my family. Four warm bodies all needing care and love and attention. The weaver in my understands that this is a lot to ask of those who are ill equipped. Those with faulty equipment and fallow fields. We grew twisting roots us children. We grew roots around one another and deep into sandy ground grasping for support and nutrition. Roots like this – borne from stripped earth – they can never fully grow into life without effort. People like this have fissures all the way to the core.

The weaver in me says: This is okay and beautiful and fine because we have crafted an amazing tapestry of humanness together cracked center and all. That to know vulnerability is to know how to be alive in this world. That to plumb the depths of self and soul is to be the most authentic self. The weaver houses the parts of me that know forgiveness and patience and peace and compassion. She knows how to give back to the world.

The pieces of me closest to the cracks – she rages. She says FUCK that. She grabs my shoulders and turns me to look as the shit from whence I came and the shit that I carried with me into adulthood and whispers that this is the gift of my youth. The shell of what “should have been” sitting like a burned out house. She shows me my roots moving up and over my body in a latticework of scars. She knows how to smoke and drink and fight and fuck. She knows how to destroy worlds. Age has made her more tender but she still comes to the surface when I am afraid.

Fear & Loss

I knit the edges of my family together because I cannot imagine a life in which the thread of connection is lost. I am scared of losing them because to do so would mean many things but broken down to its most basic of parts…it would mean failure. I failed at that task set before me in my youth and carried into adulthood.

I failed at loving the history of pain and violence and anger from our veins. I failed my family.

It is more than this but years of sitting with the eddies of such things in my life have distilled it to one selfish “I” statement.

I know that it is an improbable or perhaps impossible task (thank you therapy), but I do it anyway because I love and I love because my heart was made for it. When my body was being folded together inside of my mother she must have loved deeply and in turn washed me with …something that imparted this nature. I can remember only a handful of days in my life when helping others was not at the fore. They are the cracked days of necessary selfishness.

All others days I try to give.

Because I want to.

Because it is in my nature.

Because I have been giving from youth.

Because I want to make up for my youth.

Because I want the world to know no suffering.

Because I want my family to know no suffering.

Because I won’t have a cracked soul anymore.

Just because.

Fate

Have you ever heard the story of the red thread of fate? It’s goes like this:

The gods tie a red thread between people who are meant to meet. They follow their individual paths and the thread spools out behind them through the entirety of their lives until one day, they are pulled together in meeting…because they could have never done it any other way.

In the darkest parts of the latest nights I like to imagine that my family is trussed together with so much red thread that even if we tried we could not fall apart. In the lightness of pre-dawn I trust that if I stopped knotting us together that the bonds would hold. That in all of our vulnerable beauty we would find the courage to trust in our imperfectness. Trust it enough that when weight is added we can withstand it. Fully come together at the edges and bear it together.

Sx3 – Teller of tales dreamer of dreams.

Yep- that is the end friends. No beautifully wrapped ending this time. Forgive me my indulgences.

Tagged: cancer, fallow fields, greek myth

Posted in: Lessons, Life, Life Stories, Love