Hearing Truth

Today is my thirty-first birthday.  Tonight, actually, marks my unexpectedly early arrival and the beginning of me, my story that has become inextricably interwoven with the people and places around me.  Reading Under the Tuscan Sun years ago, a single sentence about the essence of being Southern sticks with me--how I define myself is deeply rooted in place.  She means location, but for me I think defining myself began with the place I took in my family beginning that night.  I am the first grandchild on both sides, the oldest cousin, an only child who was lucky to live through a premature and infection stressed start.  That place has shifted as dearly loved grandparents pass away and my own family grows.  Well, it has and hasn't--if I'd never been those things, I'd be a very different person now.

I've been thinking a lot lately about who I am.  I know where I am and how pleased I am with the current location situation, but who is harder to pin down.  The ways we think of ourselves are too often subjective, adverbs and adjectives that describe what we like, what we do, what we have.  The trap of dualities once fallen into is hard to escape-I am not one thing, so I must be the opposite.  I like nouns.  In the order that they happened, I am:

A daughter
A granddaughter
A niece
A cousin
A friend
A student
A writer
A lover
A wife
A mother
A teacher
A doula

It's a much shorter list than I expected when I first started pecking out letters.  These are things that I am independent of judgement, my own or that of others.  There are probably a few more that could be added, but I think there is more truth in a free-write sketch. 

A literal translation of one of my favorite phrases, sat nam, is, "I am truth," or literally translated, "true name."  Don't get all into the multi-layered philosophy of it.  Again, it complicates things.  There are the words, and there is the most simple definition.  If you listen just right, the lung filling, catch at the peak inhale is, "Sat," the exhale's deflating hiss, "Nam."

The above list is me--my true name, my truth, the things that make up what I consider to be me at my very core.

I don't mean truth as in perfection or the opposite of a lie, though certainly it would be a lie to say that I am not any of the nouns on that list.  They are not arguable or open for discussion.  They are truth.  Had I said, "I am a good or bad <noun>," there would be room for falsehood.  So truth as in veracity of self-definition is the idea I'm after. 

How freeing is it to think that you are your own truth?  Truth is not static though comprised of very concrete words.  It is expansive.  It begins as a tiny person free of any concept of "me," unfolds slowly as that child navigates familial roles and growing friendships, and explodes as their experiences and passions further solidify their true name.  Breathing is necessarily a process of opposites--without the in you cannot have the out.  Listen closely and remember two words.  You will hear, "I am truth."