Black Sheep or Blind Mice?
In the midst of my journey to understand my place in the world, I’ve found myself returning to the spiral, the ouroboros, and the myth of Sisyphus—the feeling of being on a never-ending track of beginnings that lead to ends that are, again, beginnings. On good days, these roads feel like a way of life to be enjoyed, even in the darkest moments, when you think this is the end. You know there is always more to come, and out of it you will become mighty. On bad days, however, the dejection of facing the same lessons and answers over and over again—despite thinking you have moved so far away from the version of yourself you wanted to leave behind—is crippling.
I have been obsessed with the quote, “We are not homeless beings suspended between two worlds, parts of but only partly belonging to nature, with a longing for something else. No—we are home,” by Carlo Rovelli, from Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. As someone who frequently experiences dissociation and body dysmorphia, the feeling of not being human is one that has followed me for a long time. I have often said, “I feel like an alien,” to many people I have come across in life. But to hear that even my feeling of being displaced is something designed by nature—that there is no other home to go to but the one I feel so disconnected from—feels suffocating.
This recently reminded me of drawings I made in kindergarten: a green hill with all my friends holding hands, the sun in the corner, and the blue sky at the top of the page, like another blue hill in the sky. The middle of the page would be left empty and white, as if the people between the sky and the earth were in some kind of narrow tunnel. A bright and happy-looking intestine.
What if the spiral I believed humans were standing on is not the road at all? What if the tight space between the lines is where we actually stand—squeezed between heaven and earth, like a lab rat “let loose” in a never-ending maze? Are we all Atlas, holding up the heavy sky as our feet blister and bury into the earth?
And just as you are about to forget where you are—even if you want to forget, even if you don’t want to think about where you are—nature will remind you, through the tips of your fingers, the bottoms of your toes, the eyes of hurricanes, the infinite space above the pressing sky, and everything else that refuses to let you fully disappear.
