Kill Some Carrots in the New Year
Having the audacity to be your imperfect self.
*Video clip from my trip in Asia | Pokhara, Nepal, April 2023.
Last week I was sick doing some reflecting because that’s what being sick sometimes makes you do.
I was thinking about the human condition, watching all the people around me including myself overindulge (not just for the holidays or for pleasure in its own right) but to simply deal.
The human condition is an anxious one. Period.
I heard myself thinking.
We all don’t know what we’re doing some of the time. The thing is, we made it here and that’s pretty damn big. Everyday we make it somehow. On some, vice-ing off and self-destructing is how we do it. And that’s okay.
It’s a human reaction.
Of course too much of that leads to more suffering. As with everything, it’s about balance.
That led me to another thought which is the beauty (and utility) of being imperfect. How imperfection is also our condition, one we all too often try to fight or manage or fix or hide. Yet embracing imperfection is the route to freedom. It’s the route to creation (before order, was chaos: think the Big Bang). It’s the route to finding novel solutions and ultimately, our peace of mind.
To stop fighting who we are, where we are, how we are…and just be. There’s profound healing in that, even if we drop the fight just for an hour or a day.
But even more, there’s an outright boldness to it. Having the audacity to be a fool, a bitch, a drunk, a coward, a rascal, a whore, a prude, a bum, a blabbering, blubbering mess.
All of who we are must be included, for us to become whole.
I’ve been trying lately to radically be myself in whatever way she is manifesting in the moment. To own without attaching to any version she presents…
On that note, here’s one of my favorites from poet, Ada Limon.
I Remember the Carrots
I haven’t given up on trying to live a good life,
a really good one even, sitting in the kitchen
in Kentucky, imagining how agreeable I’ll be –
the advance of fulfillment, and of desire –
all these needs met, then unmet again.
When I was a kid, I was excited about carrots,
their spidery neon tops in the garden’s plot.
And so I ripped them all out. I broke the new roots
and carried them, like a prize, to my father
who scolded me, rightly, for killing his whole crop.
I loved them: my own bright dead things.
I’m thirty-five and remember all that I’ve done wrong.
Yesterday I was nice, but in truth I resented
the contentment of the field. Why must we practice
this surrender? What I mean is: there are days
I still want to kill the carrots because I can.
Happy Holidays and New Year, my friends.
Thanks for reading and being your messy, wonderful, imperfect self.
Much LOVE,
Danielle
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Ah. Carrots. And so many more things embedded in memory, the detritus that makes us who we are: upright and whole while broken and bent.