Something that I hadn't even really given much thought to was the way that the human habit of categorizing everything often leads to us being very rigid about whether a thing is or is not something. We just don't allow for much flexibility or blending of concepts or of identities. Maybe its a western culture thing, maybe its a US thing, I'm not sure but once it was brought to my attention it seemed so obvious. Even things that by their nature can't be neatly divided into distinct categories, like ancestry or religion or feelings, we nonetheless try to shoehorn into distinct boxes. Maybe there's some kind of comfort in it, as if we can understand a thing better of we can clearly define and delineate it.
But things just don't work that way.
 |
| inside Loughcrew |
What got me thinking about this was a dream.
I was talking to my friend among the Daoine Maithe and she was...let's just say annoyed. Annoyed at the way I was trying to understand something as either one thing or another.
"Why not both?" she said, frowning, "Why can't you see that a person's nature isn't a serving of food to be divided up and portioned out? You can look at this apple and see that it is an apple, and red, and ripe, and hard, and know that it is a plant and you understand it can be all of those things at the same time, that they are all aspects of its nature, but you look at other things, at people, and want them to be a single thing, to be this or that. But nothing is only a single thing. We are all a dizzying combination of things and those things change, expand and contract and reshape. You want a person to be human or of the sidhe, to be alive or dead, to be entirely one thing that you consider its nature but that is not Truth. A person cannot be divided into portions, measured as this much one thing and that much another; all things are whole within themselves. All things are True to themselves."
She was talking, in part, about the idea of belonging which is what had started that lecture. The idea that I had which was undeniably influenced by fiction and by cultural narratives, that someone can be partially part of something, like a culture. She rejected that entirely (pun intended) and tried to explain that people are always wholly whatever they are - wholly belonging or wholly not. Part of a community or outside it. To use an example Lugh wasn't half-Fomorian and half Tuatha De by her reckoning but wholly Fomorian and wholly Tuatha De; excepting he chose the Tuatha De and so aligned himself with that. Bres was his mirror, wholly Fomorian and wholly Tuatha De but ultimately choosing the Fomorians. In the same way she scoffed at the idea from modern fiction of half elves - you cannot be half an elf she said, nor half a human, because how could any living thing function that way? You can only and always be whole in yourself, the completion of all that you are. And sometimes that means being two things simultaneously, being an elf and a human, and finding a balance within yourself with those two things, to continue the metaphor.
The wilderness doesn't just stop where civilization begins. The forest doesn't end where the meadow starts. The offspring of a horse and a donkey isn't half of each parent - it is the combination of them, the blending of them into a new whole which is both. In the same way we each as individuals are a combination of many things, of all of the things that have made us and are making us. And we are whole.
Life is a messy, overlapping, shifting experience and so is who and what we are.
