Acceptance

SU’s dying bon-fire.

A lot of people spend decades trying to solve themselves by rearranging their environment.

New jobs.

New looks.

New identities.

New relationships.

New distractions.

New ideologies.

People can be super inventive when it comes to avoiding the simple possibility that they might already be enough or need to take better self-accountability.

I am in a state of acceptance.

I will never succumb or surrender to…

those who want me to be less.

Because if I can accept who I am…

What is there to change, if one is constantly changing to accommodate the environment?

So…

the best choice…

Is acceptance.

Acceptance is strange because it can look like giving up.

But it isn’t giving up at all.

It is finally stopping the unnecessary internal struggle.

The version of me sleeping outside by the fire, tending the land, listening to the wind in the trees, isn’t becoming someone new. I am becoming less concerned about what people think; I am exiting my people pleasing stage.

I have spent years solving problems, carrying responsibilities, proving competence, surviving systems, navigating institutions, helping other people build their futures.

Useful work.

But a person can become so effective at carrying weight that they forget what it feels like to simply exist.

Nature is brutally fair in certain ways.

It accepts exactly what is in front of it.

I plant a seed.

I tend to the plant.

And it grows.

“This land has never deceived me.”

The peace comes from living outside deception, and accepting the reality in front of me.

If soil is healthy, things grow.

If a fence is broken, you fix it.

Cause and effect.

Just reality.

I look backward at earlier versions of myself and realize they carry burdens I can now see more clearly. Just a human being trying to navigate a complex world with missing information.

Wisdom Isn’t about accumulating answers, its about reducing unnecessary conflict.

A river becomes clear not because more water is added, but because the mud settles.

Maybe that’s what’s happening.

A gradual settling of sediment after a very long storm.

And for someone who has spent much of her life analyzing patterns, there is irony here:

I went looking for truth in systems, institutions, technology, history, biology, physics, and philosophy...

Then part of the answer was waiting beside a fire, on a patch of land, under the same stars that watched my grandparents.

Maybe enlightenment arrives as silence.