12:45pm September 6, 2013

My view from the ground.

Our bodies were walking around near each other. I’d been assured these would be people like me, that I would love being around these people.

Only here was I. I was walking around on the ground. Or perhaps in the ground, under the ground, under the water.

I met a tiny number of others down there. We recognized each other, but the way things were structured, we were all separate from each other.

But then all these other people. They were walking around in the sky. Talking to other sky people. Delighting in being sky people.

And those of us who were walking through the dirt instead of the clouds. We were separated by a a barrier of distance that we could not cross. And we were separated from each other. So no matter who seemed to be near us, we were isolated beyond belief.

But the sky people didn’t see who any of us were. They didn’t see the distance, not consciously – although they sometimes referred to some ground people as they, not we.

But mostly? They just saw our bodies. And they saw that our bodies were close to their bodies. So they assumed we all felt the same warm flow of togetherness that they felt. They were happy with themselves for us being there at all.

They couldn’t see, really see, our isolation from them or our isolation from each other. They couldn’t see that they were in the sky and we were under the ground. They were oblivious to the differences and the distance.

Sky people have a set of cognitive and social and cultural traits in common, ground people are everyone who can’t fit into that mold. For any reason. Sometimes sky people can tell who is a ground person, sometimes they mistake us for sky people.

The awful and uncomfortable situations I’ve described aren’t inevitable though.

I’ve been in situations where I’ve seen other ground people. And down under the ground where we live, we’ve connected. Because nobody was getting in our way, and we had the freedom to do this.

We built burrows and rejoiced in our burrows and we reveled in the root systems while the sky people reveled in the clouds. Some sky people tried to come down to the ground. Some ground people tried to go to the sky. Some of us were successful. Some were not. But everyone accepted how everyone else was. And everyone understood WHERE everyone else was.

And it was so much better than the other situation. The awful one. Where I was told that acceptance, belonging, and love meant being considered an honorary sky person. And they did not actually stick their heads underground to check so, to them, I have to be a sky person. And I’m ungrateful if I’m not happy being an honorary sky person. Because any ground person should jump at the opportunity.

I would rather stand with our backs to each other and see each other perfectly, than stand, physically facing each other, and you can’t see me at all.