You Are a Collective

We all have stories written in our bones. Echoes, memories, the learned way our muscles will tense or relax at a voice or a proposition, the patterns we’ve memorized with something much more primal than mind. We name these echoes, these stories nurtured in, call some trauma, call others joy, practice moving and loving within them. Our histories chronicled in sinews and skins, our old habits and first loves and worst nightmares circulating in our systems while we go about our being in the world.

Before you learned these stories, there were older, ancient, fundamental rhythms at work in your body. You are a collective, born a symphony of parts performing roles innate to their being for centuries, millennia, something beyond. You, unique and wild in the world, are a system of the sweetest simple complex stories – of community and dependence, of rest and protection and need. Your cells, your souls, the indistinguishable parts of you are playing out the script as you listen – leaning on and into each other, responding and holding and rushing to aid, asking and becoming and dying and being born.

You are an orchestra, and the things you crave, the desire written deep in your marrow, is the oldest essential story – connection. Creation. Collaboration. Community. You are at once small in a universe too vast to imagine and a universe of intricate detail contained within the confines of your skin. You are part of an interdependent system, and your are an interdependent system all your own. You are a complex and simple story, poetry and hard facts and patterns as old as time. You are a truth and a fiction, an inevitability and a tale wholly your own to tell.

And I know one thing for certain – we are in this alone, and we are in this together. We belong to ourselves, and we belong to each other. We stand families and soloists, we rise united and entirely our own, and down to the smallest measure of your being, you belong.

In your cells, in your bones, in your beginning – you belong.

-Karyn Thurston, as heard in episode 044