A Chorography to Ashes

There is a map I carry, though it is still being drawn. It lives beneath my skin, outlined in the soft tissue of being. It charts no cities, no rivers, no borders ~ but it knows the terrain of loss, the coordinates of silence and the fault lines of a dissonant reaching for fulfillment in this thing we have named 'life'. It yearns desperately towards the happy and sublime.

We begin life in a watery cocoon~~~hearing our mother's heartbeat. We feed from her digestion - her breathing and the muffled sounds from the outside world.

I was happy and content, for I could not hear the clamor clearly...just bits and pieces of something alien intruding upon my quiet self. I was content, not yet being a visitor to that place~~~not yet privy to the knowing of a different existence awaiting me in all of the turmoil of the exterior places...I was initially, thankfully, spared from the actual truth, safe in my own little interior world.

I do remember hearing music and laughter...They were the sounds which kept me grounded - the saving grace that prepared me for life on the exterior of my cozy womb chrysalis...awaiting my metamorphosis.

I became fully formed, and without my express permission, was plucked, naked, from my haven of safety- unceremoniously displayed - and deposited into the world of humanity.

They slapped me...I kicked and screamed, wanting to escape the wicked wretches.

Thus began the first years of a whirlwind of confusion...of blank faces whom I do not remember, and family, lots of family members all jumbled into one tilting rat race towards uncertainty...towards rebellious emotions and sibling rivalry...all of the expectations of a large and completely clueless hub of tiny, medium and larger bodies of humanity. Emotions wafted wretched, happy, consistently complex and bewildering, a jumble of personalities clashing, merging and sometimes, uniting.

But the Map~~~the map was secretly forming within the happy moments, although I did not yet know it.

I first felt the chill of the map's presence in the winter of my early years, when my mother stopped singing holy songs of upliftment for a long while. Her songs became dirges and requiems. Her voice had been the compass of our home - the old church hymns accompanying her through laundry and cooking, threading bible verses into the dusk. But the year came when it all changed, grief took root in her throat. My grandmother died, and within her, something sad and unspoken collapsed. My grandfather, her father, a fisherman, had long been lost at sea.

I didn’t understand it then, how lonely she must have felt, how naked and alone life felt after losing one's parents. Until my own losses stared me in the face.

Somewhere on the fringed periphery, I remember my father, an enigma who was practically absent, always out seeking ways to support his large family of brats who appreciated nothing...until it was too late and we lost him. My mother stopped singing completely.

Yet, we experience the happy, in-between the cobwebs...it lurks, waiting to pounce.

For the thing that stood out most starkly for me was my mother's kindness - her ability to smile through the darkest of times, when she gave even when there was nothing to give...denying herself comforts if it meant a stranger would find solace in her home and beyond. Scattered across the world are children now grown who remember my mother. 'Ma', they would say...'what a blessed soul she was'.

That was when the map had really begun to form: a blank space where music used to sooth - but still, the fire of benevolence, compassion, generosity and goodwill would be the flame that guided our paths. A compass my mother had left us. It led to where life started showing me different paths to the fulfillment of the self.

Those paths all would resonate and resound. When misfortune dawned, I would blame it on myself being led astray by the devil. BUT, when good fortune reared it's head. I would say~~It is my mother's blessings protecting me from the wolves~~my mother's voice always whispering in my ear as the map guided and propelled me forward.

Years later, I would learn to read that silence like a legend. The absence of my individual sounds marked the beginning of a journey - not away from pain or responsibility, but into it. I wandered through adolescence like a lost traveler, tracing the contoured growing pains as insecure shame, not understanding that youth was a continuous bumble and stumble into learning and growth. I learned really late that rising and falling, laughing at myself and just enjoying the moments would have been enough.

The high point is that I finally did awake to the knowing that there was something larger being written upon the map. I reached out to the discovering of this elusive thing...the finding of actualized existing.

There were always valleys of doubt throughout the growing years. I mistook acts of erroneous survival for weakness. Thinking strength was always the ability to stand tall, never falling or faltering. I tried very hard to hide within my invisibility. I folded myself into corners, hoping no one would notice the fear in my eyes.

But as growing and learning teaches each one of us uniquely, also comes the discovery that maps are not static. They evolve with the traveler.

At nineteen, I met a someone friend, who saw the fault lines and didn’t flinch. She asked questions that cracked open the crust of my practiced calm. “What do you miss?” she asked once, and I said, “The growing version of me that knows how to live.” That night, I dreamed of a house built from the veins and arteries of my own heart, each room a different age, each window a different love, regret, shame, laughter, tears and journeys to places yet unconquered. The doors led to nowhere and to everywhere...I stepped through the aperture of light and began a new journey filled with hope and promise.

I woke with the sense that the map had shifted. There were new paths now, ones that led through vulnerability, not around it.

Emergence is not a single act. It is a series of small rebellions against the gravity of despair. It is learning to name the ghosts without feeding them. It is the moment you choose to speak, even when your voice shakes. It is the day you return to the place that you thought had broken you. But you know now, that that place never broke you, the pain was only making you stronger - and so you return to reclaim the soil.

I have walked through fire. I have buried versions of myself in the ash. But each time, something remained - a glowing ember, a thread of warmth. I have learned to follow it.

Now, when I trace the map within me, I see more than scars. I see the places I paused to weep, the bridges I built from forgiveness, the mountains I climbed with hope. I see the people who walked beside me, even when I couldn’t ask them to. I see the songs I’ve begun to sing again.

I see many different ways to tell my story, even if they are all similar in tone and inference. They all lead back to the same process, the reasoning diverting just a bit...

This map is not finished. It never will be. But it is mine. And it tells the enigmatic story of a life that will not end with silence, but with a roar that is still resounding...finding its way through it.

Deep down the soul knows how to map and reflect the intangible terrain of yearning.

It knows how to paint its Cartography, its chorography to the Ashes of the past blowing towards the uncertain future.

The soul knows its chorography and its choreography - the sum of all of its smaller parts.

Rising. Supporting.