Different views

 This afternoon as I was driving, I was thinking about the trees again and how thick the foliage is, it is the darkest, thickest, most unkempt looking greenery ever seen around here. The city is on fire, a blaze of green catching and spreading up and down, through east and west, from the north to the south, shooting and spraying into the sky and across streets, towering as far as the eye can see.

I absolutely love it. My daughter likes to make videos of street scenes as she drives through the city and she has downloaded music she plays over them. They can be pretty entertaining and her followers are in the tens of thousands. I decided I wanted to make a video of the trees before the summer is over. It's a goal.

 I have goals now, it's a new thing for me. I used to just live, now I assign myself purpose, with a deadline.

I noticed that I was always trying to share things about Atlanta with East Tennessee where I lived for many years, until I moved back about 8 years ago. I thought about them and shared moments, photos, not in any real way, but in intention, so that there was an understanding about myself, who left after never quite adapting.

I haven't gone all in on Darwin. It isn't that I do not believe in the idea of things working out for the best, I do. It is just that natural selection is contrary to that extra special human characteristic that is undefinable, the idea that only the strong survives doesn't make room for compassion, love, empathy. So I didn't adapt to living there but I am cool with that. I hated living there. I never felt particularly loved and safe and certainly very alone. I felt crazy. I have not felt that way since being back here. I got back and it was like a friendship that picked up after years apart. So much easy and good rapport. I could feel ashamed of my never fitting in but I don't. I decided to turn the tables instead. I decided that I had been fortunate, that I grew up in a beautiful place, a great garden, neat and clean, with beautiful buildings and people, and if I never adapted there, being able to come back and find I am unoffensive and acceptable here, in this lovely place, has been eye opening. I wasn't adapted to being there, and they never adapted to me. In a place that was not a quarter as green, with broken homes turned out into the lawns, scraps of civilization popping up in patches, sparse like an old thin man's beard. And spreading 10 square miles, to new places, with less to see, smaller, named and independent. 

I love to drive. It is what I do for a living. I used to drive for hours just for my nerves. In East Tennessee, I would drive out to other cities, Erwin, Elizabethton, Kingsport, Bristol, Gray, Telford ... I lived in Johnson City. These places had grown up in the early part of the 20th century and had the typical city squares. Then, apparently, they just stopped growing. I found the lack of a Chilis and proper Chinese food unbearable for the first five or seven years I lived there. And for thirteen years I remained an outsider, a stranger.

Not here. Among beautiful things, I am fine. Here, among those with money, class, I'm fine. And I was so small there, like the ugly duckling. 

It just made me think about what we know. Sometimes we think we know so much about something, when we know little or nothing. The thing about me that was so offensive, I ALWAYS thought of in so much irony, was that I was so much like the outside world. I'm a city girl, raised by writers, movie makers. My English was perfect. I was classically dressed. I did not fit.

Ironic, and that has been a great thing to see today. I can have that vantage point, the one that knows that people cannot see passed their prejudices, even things that they find pleasing and accept, they need to be able to compartmentalize or else it gets sticky and dirty.

As for me, I did meet people there, I had a cool house. I graduated from college, I ate yummy food you cannot find anywhere else, and best, I know what it is like to live so small that the mountains and God are all around me. Right next to me, just me, the mountains and the angels.