After the stroke,
when I survived, I had a new business in Sebastopol. One day I had a meeting of
some select friends, who were trying to help me promote my business. During the
course of that interaction one of my friends asked me a question that helped me
enormously. She asked me, after observing me in action during the meeting, “if
I was a disabled person or, a person with disabilities?” That question rumbled
around in me for a long time. Sometimes, it still does. Now, I consider it to
be one of the greatest gifts of support I ever got. I’ll explain why, if it
isn’t obvious. In the process, I hope to reveal how the question contained in
the title is equally potent and essential.
At the time the
question regarding my identity was posed to me, I was definitely a disabled
person. Although I knew instantly what she was asking, which made clear the
stakes associated with whatever identity I took on, I was what I was, having
little capacity to be anything else. I knew, though, that I would be better off
if I were a person first and disabled second. Happily, I didn’t lie to myself.
I was a rather desperate disabled person, who only now knew that I had a choice.
It took awhile to become a person with disabilities, and it wasn’t easy.
It wasn’t easy then,
for precisely the same reason it isn’t easy to really consider my title
question. There were, and are, plenty of people around who assume what one’s
identity is. For many, seeing me in my wheelchair, I was a disabled person,
whom they had a variety of reactions to. They simply couldn’t perceive the
person in the chair. Today my question about wildness/domestication has equal
implications, and confronts equal blindness.
The wild is
somewhere out there, isn’t it?
I am a creature of
culture; all of us are, at least initially. So to some extent I am
domesticated. But, I have a choice about it, a choice, which has big
implications for me, and my environmental surroundings. If my identity stays
firmly put in cultural domestication, then I will live according to options
provided by others. In that scenario it is very common to feel the potential
for greater loss of self, and to feel pressured by the noose of conformity. If,
however, one gains, through a lifetime of self assertion, a sense of being, by
one’s own hands, truly wild, original, and unique, then something else, totally
unpredictable, happens.
Are you wild, or,
are you domesticated? This, too, is a question of identity. It carries great
implications. The stakes are potent, dripping with significance, begging for an
honest assessment. It’s unlikely that almost anyone has slipped entirely the
bonds of culture. For most, this is just the water that we swim in. But, for
some, wildness means breaking free (not entirely, just enough), not protesting,
or lamenting, or forgetting, and not feeling confined or defined by the
cultural crowd. For these feral humans, there is a great sense of
responsibility, a natural self possession, enhanced by identification with what
existed before history. I don’t mean before writing, painting on cave walls, or
burial rituals, I mean before the idea that we, human beings, are somehow separate
from Nature. We aren’t, not exclusively. Wildness is deeply embedded in us, and
we are deeply embedded in it.
I have to struggle
daily with a body/mind that is only partially functional. I think my struggle
to be perceived, and to see myself, as fully human, as a person, is comparable
to struggling constantly to free myself, to be as wildly original as I am. No
snowflake is more unique than I. Adopting this reality is teaching me what a
complicated and miraculous achievement all Life is, and it is growing my
respect for the Life of all beings.
I pose this question
because we live in an age where it is assumed that the wild is out there.
Because this is so, for most there seems to be no choice. This has been a
costly assumption. Many of the ills of our times go back to a belief that we
humans have somehow transcended Nature, forgetting that we are Nature
incarnate.
We are not, and have
never been, alone in this magnificent Universe!
* * * * * * * * * * * *
For more pieces like this, go to www.elderssalon.blogspot.com
(2010 thru 2013) and http://www.elderssalon2.blogspot.com (2014 on)
To hear archived versions of our radio program Growing An Elder Culture go to www.elderculture.com
To read excerpts, or otherwise learn, about Embracing Life: Toward A Psychology of
Interdependence go to http://www.davidgoff.net
