Alabama

Go back to go forward. Sometimes you have to go back farther than you want to, and then farther again. I've come back to a place that I was from a long time ago. I wasn't born here. I don't know it's geography the way I know the ridges of the Sierras. I don't cherish its groves the way I do the fruit-filled forests of Maui. I don't welcome its humidity the way I do the soft misty fog creeping over the Puget Sound. Because I have never seen its small gulf coast, I am always lost in the lay of its land. I am not proud of this place, but I defend it fiercely. I don't get its religion, but its white chapel churches I honor despite myself. This place holds the people I have dared to forget about and the people I cannot stop loving. The bones of my ancestors - African, Cherokee, Muscogee, French - are moving fossils held in the rock and blood of its geology. I am angry at this land, for if I was not of it, I would never think of it. If I was not of it, I could pretend to love it. I am in this place now, breathing its soul in... and oh the truths I've learned, the secrets I've inherited, the pains I've sung, and the laughs I've ached out with tears. What a painful treasure this place is. A secret, smelling of sweet gum trees and steel furnaces, whose existence is mighty, whose history is majestic, whose truth pushes me onward boldly into a life I am no longer afraid of living.

Copyright 2011