Inheritance

A native son must at some point despise the land which he inherits if he is ever to understand the full beauty and truth of what it all means without him and more so, what it means within him.

AH (Wayward Armie)

We all run from home in some capacity, some of us through education, some through occupation, some through infatuation and some through indignation but the wisdom of home seems to call us back or follow us whichever way we go, it is the inheritance of a native daughter, a native son. Inheritance is as best I can describe it, a knowledge that is craving us to seek the landscape of our ancestral past, its lessons, its tradition, its struggle, its perseverance and mostly its love. I often wonder how we can understand the absolute beauty and truth of our inheritance if we have never challenged it to be unbeautiful or untruthful. In some ways to despise something is to challenge its existence to change our mind, to place in bold letters our limitations to see its grandeur and provide us with its grace when we meet those limitations in ourselves. “Prove to me” is the battle cry of every generation, in our hubris, we want to break the circle of which we are tethered to, but that circle has created us and bound us only by the integrity of familial and spiritual love. The notion of restriction is self-imposed deception, for we are not dependent nor independent of our ancestral landscape, our heritage.

What is our heritage without us? It is tradition, values, ethics, integrity, it is a survivor. Yes, isn’t the truth of its beauty the fact that it has survived in order to give you and me a purpose within us? Pass along that tradition, that code of ethics, that principle that was entrusted to us from generations that lived before our existence without the slightest idea of who we would be. Let that kind of unconditional love settle within you, understand its beauty and its truth, it exists in your authentic self so let it be what survives in this world so that somewhere there will be a generation you have entrusted with such majestic beauty to carry along its tethered, unconditional love. It is your inheritance, be a worthy custodian, it will not always be yours to despise nor cherish, its truth may survive without you but its beauty can only live because of you.