12

12. 12 years since 2012. Twelve fingers I was born with—until my family and doctors, worried about my ability to fit in, had them removed. 12 years since I felt called to share my thoughts in a wider way; since I tried writing and organising them in this somewhat public forum. 12 seems to recur in significant ways as we organise our experience in the Western world. In hours and in months.

We are excellent at finding connections between entirely different aspects of our experience. We see connections and significance everywhere we look. We get lost in noticing it or we rebel and become adamant there is no significance in these synchronicities and coincidences at all. We get lost in denying significance. We forget that we are the arbiters of significance and we choose what matters as we craft the story of ourselves.

I chose ‘finding logos’, years ago, because I was enchanted by the concept of words making sense of the cosmos. Granting sense to the cosmos. The greek idea of Logos, as described by Heraclitus, seemed to be the same Tao spoken of by Laozi. Perhaps proving that it is “not something that can be forgotten or left in the marketplace” or something which must be “passed from father to son,” but instead something any of us can find. We find signs of the connective ordering principle of the universe whenever we open ourselves to noticing it. In chinese Tao or 道 dào, is a path, or perhaps more accurately ‘way-making’. In philosophy, it’s something active, that we do, and which everything does. We do not so much find our way as work with everything else to make our way. Logos is the word, it is speech and it is ‘sense-making’. The Greeks leaned on language to find reason, whereas the Chinese from the outset denied it as getting in the way, but then went on talking.

“Now I will try to say some words here about ‘this’... Now I have said something. But I do not-yet know; has what I have said really said anything? Or has it not really said anything?” Zhuangzi

Well, let’s find some words and make our way.

I haven’t lived in trees in a long time, more than for a night or two, but I know them much better now and I am finding my way to back to sleeping in their boughs.

I’m still learning languages. Fluency, like a carrot on a stick, dangles just out of reach—sometimes closer, sometimes farther and with each language pulling me in different . I have accepted my relationship with languages will always be frustrating.

I still train parkour. Though I flip less than I used to, I feel more comfortable than ever moving with confidence in the ways I have practiced. The gift of time for sure.

I still practice kung fu. In 12 years I gained students and began teaching. I left those students to find other training as I left the country, the continent, and all the communities that had helped me become who I am. I teach now again. I still learn, and I haven’t stopped being amazed at what my art reveals to me over time.

So little else about my life is the same after all this time. Not long after my last entry in 2012, I met my partner H. Some time later we decided we would leave the US and make a life for ourselves elsewhere. We got married in a ceremony only attended by siblings and our two closest friends and then we left. We set out to do relationship and marriage differently, and better, and I think we largely have. For this reason we keep our marriage mostly to ourselves, something we picked up a long the way.

We lived in several countries, trying to learn who we were and who we could be, in new environments and in a new partnership. We realised what mattered to us more and more as we went on and became better able to search those things out and cultivate them when we found them.

We settled in Scotland, feeling called to the temperate rainforests we had found in the western stretches of Ireland and the UK. The shockingly green woods reveal themselves as if from a fairy tale, daring you to deny the magic of the natural world.

We embraced a much closer relationship to the natural world than we had felt able to cultivate before. I slept in trees before, but now I cultivated relationships with them. I learned their rhythms, their stories; their friendships and rivalries. Staying still, I found myself learning all the plants and fungi in this new home. I let myself grow roots and try to see where I fit in my adopted ecosystem.

Community and human connection emerged as critical sources of meaning. H and I knew early on we were going to live in community everywhere we went and that where we couldn’t find it we would make it. We now live in a house with 8 others and we have been living this way, in intentional community for most of the past 7 years. We are working towards a vision of community in the woods, with treehouses and friends that will be the next step in our journey.

We also embraced a journey to not close the doors to the love that could come into our lives through new connections. Early in our relationship we discussed our beliefs in the value of being open to romance and love with others and I realised how much I had always felt called to romantic love with more than one person. We worked to create space in our relationship to live polyamorously and allow as much connection and love into our lives as we could respectfully and logistically hold. Years later, we are as in love with each other as ever and both have other significant others with whom we learn, love, and grow. We could not be who we are now without those people we chose to invite into our lives and the journey it has taken in order to try to do so well.

I wrote this mostly for myself, feeling a tear in the fabric that needed a patch, linking past and present. I am excited to share the λόγος I continue to find and hope you, too, can weave meaning from all this madness.

There’s so much more to say but that’s a start.