Transcendentally ERUDITE

Do I really need to be Erudite

Deeply knowledgeable and well-read - to be taken seriously.

At times, I grow weary of quoting wise philosophers of old

of feeling that I may seem un-educated and un-learned

if I cannot summon Rumi, Nietzsche, Marx, Simone de Beauvoir, Plato, Confucius, Edward W. Crosby - or modern Black thinkers - Angela Davis, Naomi Zack, Charles W. Mills...I could go on.

What if I just want to be myself, quoting myself ~

emphasizing the importance of maintaining my individuality and authenticity in a forever demanding and conformity driven society.

What if I do not desire life in a world that is constantly asking me to be somebody else...

Let me be my own greatest accomplishment

Transcendentally Individual~ Self reliant...

with a deep connection to nature and my own inner voice...

Let me find wisdom within myself - despite society's insistence otherwise.

Our being yearns to descend into us - though we know not where our being was birthed

....

Still, admittedly...truthfully ~ some quotes are just phenomenal.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said,

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."

“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in …forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day.”

“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.”

Yet....

Sometimes I fell lost...insecure, wondering at my place in this vast and confusing world wilderness which we sometimes view as home...and at other times - we are like alien beings adrift through a dense fog within which we are blindly groping for a rope to anchor our bleeding psyche.

...

Things always seem so out of order. Maybe not ALWAYS...

That is how it seems most of the time.

There are those rare wonderful moments when ...everything seems completely perfect...the stars seem to align themselves just for us...individually!

A curtain lifts to reveal a room you didn’t realize was glowing...and for a moment- life is worth the pain, suffering and disappointments. For LOVE may have just entered into the equation...THEY...whomever ' they' are...say that love changes everything...if only just for a short while.

It is in those few wonderful moments that the world hold its breath...and tilt its face toward you.

When the ordinary geometry of living rearranges itself ~subtly, silently ~~

everything feels improbably aligned, the universe has paused its great machinery just long enough to whisper, “This one is yours.”

...

Other times it’s bigger ~~

a decision that clicks into place,

a truth that finally stops running from you,

a sense of being exactly where you’re meant to be,

not by accident but by some quiet choreography

you didn’t know you were part of.

These are the moments when time folds a little,

when your younger self and your older self

seem to nod at each other across the years,

both recognizing the same rare glimmer.

And for a breath or two,

you feel unmistakably chosen ~~

by fate, by destiny - who knows...

maybe - it is just by the sheer, startling coherence

of being alive in exactly the right second in time.

....

Should I not allow myself to be all of those things...and more. Disappointed, lost, found...Loved.

Be my own greatest accomplishment...

Transcendental. Individual.

A declaration. A claiming. A remembering. A returning to myself as something vast, contradictory, luminous, unfinished, and wholly sovereign.

Layered and unmistakably me.

Should I not allow myself…

To be disappointed, and still worthy.

Lost, and still luminous.

Found, and still searching.

To be loved, and still learning how to give and receive it.

...

To be all of these things ~ never in sequence, nor tidy categories,

but all at once...become weather shifting inside a single sky.

...

Why shouldn’t one be their own greatest accomplishment?

Not the polished nor the curated versions ~~

but the full, contradictory, transcendent self

who has survived every version of you that outlived the fire.

Being transcendentally individual

is not to stand apart from others,

it's standing fully inside yourself

without apology, shrinking, or asking permission

to inhabit the exact shape you were meant to take.

Let disappointments be teachers,

losses compost.

Let love be your found lantern,

~ especially the love you give yourself ~

it's architecture you build your life inside.

Declare...

I am allowed to be everything I am...everything I am becoming,

and everything I have not yet dared to imagine.

The self is not a single note... it's a chord ~

rich, dissonant, resonant, evolving.

...

And I, am allowed to play every note of it.