Pioneering connection

Have a told this story before? I would tell you to stop me if you've heard it but it may just be different this time around. Stories from my mutating memory bank usually are.

The dolls were lined up against my bedrail aka the back end of the wagon. They had bonnets over yarn hair and took on names such as Emma Mae and Constance (their real names were Anna (the blond) and Becky (the air force pilot)- way too modern. I had friends at playgroup with such names for godsake). I wore a bonnet too along with a calico dress and white fringed cowboy boots. I would sit on my bed and lead the wagon train west- to Strawberry Hill and Oregon City and places where gold rushes through the veins of mountains. To where I was told my ancestors creakily wheeled and (re)named the land a century before. I knew about the dangers of cholera and broken wagon axles and fording rushing rivers from my favorite game on our Apple IIGS. I imagined crossing grassy meadows and roasting buffalo by the campfire and drinking water from ice cold streams. I constructed multiple lives with bits of what I knew to be somebody's truth, bits of ancestral memory, bits of what I thought I wanted to be.
When I asked my mom if I was more country or city girl and she immediately replied, "City" I was angry. Sure I grew up in San Diego. Sure I lived directly above a freeway. Sure I went to an elementary school with a chain-link fence around the periphery and would later go to a middle school with gangs and guns and drive-by shootings. But we had a canyon out back and went camping for a week each year in the Sierras! I played in the mud and had a snail farm! We had dogs and cats and hamsters and birds and rabbits! How more country can you get?
I knew she was right, but I stomped my feet and threw a tantrum anyway. "I'm. A. Country. Girl!" That's all I wanted to be. Why? Being a country girl meant being a pioneer. Being a pioneer meant discovering new lands and having adventures. This is how it worked in my mind. I created the story of who I wanted to be. I didn't want to hear the truth.

So where is the line between creating the life you want through mapping out a dream (all that The Secret stuff) and creating a story in your head that prevents that dream from turning into its own unique version of reality? How do you have a goal but keep yourself open to happy distractions along the way that may delay what you think you want but really get you closer to your true path? Is there such a thing as a true path?

This applies to people as well. I am finding as I get older and more people are in my life it is actually harder to accept people for just who they are. Especially in an intimate relationship. I want a composite of all my favorite people when in reality one person will never be able to fulfill all of my needs. They can get damn close but really why would I want all my needs be met by a single soul anyway? How much pressure is that? It is so hard to start a new relationship with someone, be it friend or lover, and not have expectations of what roles (holes?) they will fill in your life. And my problem is, maker of stories that I am, that when someone doesn't live up to my story of who they are to me, I don't know where my reality lies.
I want to be in a community that encourages each other to be their best selves, where one can feel loved and brave and free to express. Sometimes I think others want the exact same thing and I let my image of them overlay and conceal the fact that maybe a connection in thoughts, feeling, spirit doesn't actually exist in the way I thought it did. That certain qualities I was trying to draw out either aren't there or I'm not the one who is meant to make that person shine. Is it ever our job to help someone else shine? I think yes- isn't that what "community" is? But like a jigsaw puzzle certain pieces fit better than others to make a beautiful picture. (like of kittens playing with yarn. Or a teacup of daisies. Or horses whinnying and neighing in a field of oats. Thats what I want my life to be like- kittens and horses and daisies.)

30 years after leading my wagon train from my bunkbed, I work on a farm. It is a story I have been telling myself for years. I got to be a pioneer on the seas for a decade and now I am getting my hands dirty instead of salty. End of the Oregon trail stuff. Am I a country girl? No. I work on a farm in the smack middle of the city. But if I close my eyes and breathe in the scent of lavender and tomato plants, if I pretend the traffic is a river and the planes overhead are approaching thunderstorms, it's almost like I'm on a "real" farm out in the country.
But that's not my story right now. I don't need to pretend I'm anywhere other than downtown because I like looking up at the skyscrapers and Coronado bridge. I like hearing sirens and students chattering about algorithms or politics. I love the fact that we grow tons of food among the concrete. It's not the story I thought it would be when I was a kid but I'm just fine with the way the plot is developing.

Now its time to turn the page and sharpen my pencil and let my new friends, new loves, new psuedo-family write their own stories in my book and be receptive to the truths, the erasures, the scribbles that will occur. I might not understand it all at first. It takes time to learn the personal languages of each individual. Patience is a challenge for me because when I was a traveling gypsy I constantly felt the need to connect deeply, intensely, immediately. And move on. Because that's all the time I thought I had.
But now, rooted in San Diego, I have time. We have time to flesh out our stories.

Keep writing, reading, living each other.
Scarier than fording a rushing river, right?