Gardening For The Soul

So I was lying in bed last week and it suddenly came to me that I wanted to write a blog about one of the most influential men in my life during my formative years.  You would be forgiven at this point for assuming a moving tribute to my Dad, a special uncle or perhaps a sport’s coach was about to follow.  Or even my brother despite the fact that he’d pin me down on the ground and drool on me.  And yes, they were influential, but the person I am talking about is Captain James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise. 

I was in love with Captain Kirk.  Not just an “oh, isn’t he nice”, but a full blown, no holds barred obsession.  Other girls were into Shaun Cassidy, Donny Osmond or the Bay City Rollers (confession at this point, I did do the short pants and tartan socks).  But nobody could touch my Captain JTK.  Each week, he’d beam down to a different planet with Spock and Bones and some poor crew member we’d never seen before, whose days were clearly numbered.  Inevitably, some alien woman would appear from nowhere and before you knew it, she was making googly eyes at my man and he, being the cool dude that he was, was being all Captainlike because after all, the ship always came first.  I made my best friend Tracy King play Star Trek games with me.  She had to be JTK and I got to be the googly eyed woman.  This approach was a very poor substitute for the real thing but it was the best I could muster at the time.

So what was this lust about?  Why Captain James Tiberius Kirk? Well to my teenage eyes, he was mighty fine looking, but I know it was more than that.  His whole life was one big, amazing adventure.  After all, he got to boldly go where no man has gone before, uninhibited by fear, to try new things.  He had the guts to beam down to goodness only knows where, unsure of what he was going to face, but still he went.   Somewhere deep down inside, I knew that I wanted to lead my life that way, to see the whole as an amazing adventure, to move boldly through life with courage and conviction.   His life seemed so liberating from my perspective, stuck where I was with my Dad drinking, my Mum mostly angry and me dreaming that Scotty would beam me up to Zeon post haste!

Now as I look at my life, is this in fact the way I’ve lived it?  The answer is yes and no.  I have made some very courageous moves in my life, I have had adventures, tried new things, faced unknowns and choosen them anyway.  But in other ways I have been very cautious, making decisions based on fear, worrying about the ‘what ifs’, playing it safe because I was not at all sure I could cope with living on the edge as I perceived it.  Ever since I turned 50 and particularly with the DCIS last year, I have been pondering my death bed perspective.  It is not morbid as I fully intend not to be there for quite some time to come.  But when I am lying there, what do I want to remember and treasure from my life?  Do I want to be pondering a safe life, carefully spent, doing the ‘right’ thing, what ever the right thing is?  Or do I want to be remembering something else?  A life where I gave it my all, where I saw what needed to be done and stood up, ready to make a difference.  The adventure for me is not about travel per se, space or otherwise but about fully experiencing my life.  Being open to all it brings, being vulnerable, being present to all that’s in it.  To live from my heart not just my head, to liberate myself so that I can truly be the full, authentic version of me.  That’s my USS Enterprise – to boldly go, period.

And I have been pondering for a few weeks now the strands that tie together the stories in this blog.  What’s the theme, what’s the focus, what am I trying to get across?  The answer is contained within this story and it is liberation.  I want to liberate myself from my self imposed limitations, to unleash my star ship in my quest to discover heaven right here on Earth.  And writing does that for me.  By putting down the words, I get to ponder, to be curious, to process, to let go.  But it goes deeper than that as I don’t just want this for me.  I want this liberation for all of us.  I can see the amazing possibilities when we live our lives from a place other than fear, when we don’t dump our crap on each other.  I can see the ways we could connect, the harmony that could exist, the care and love that we could show for each other, the amazing creativity our lives could hold.  So when I am lying there taking my final breath many light years from now, I want to look back and say yes, I made a difference.  By sharing my journey, by being open with my experiences, I can create the space for others to do the same, to ponder how they too can face their own journey to liberation.    Then I can lie on that bed with a smile on my face, knowing I did nothing less than help shape the future of humanity.

 * Kirk, Where No Man Has Gone Before, Ep 2/1312.4