

I am a nomad.
no·mad [noh-mad] noun
1. a member of a people or tribe that has no permanent abode but moves about from place to place, usually seasonally and often following a traditional route or circuit according to the state of the pasturage or food supply.
2. any wanderer; itinerant.
All of my life I have been looking for home. And always, I’ve known I wasn’t there yet, though lately I feel myself drawing close to home. Tribe — I somehow always knew — had less to do with ethnicity or nationality or class or any of the usual barometers we look to to tell us who we are. These, of course, are constructs. Who we deeply are does not arise from the color of our skin, or the landmass where we hatched ourselves into this life, or even the place where we grew up (much as our experiences there — and the bodies we inhabit — shape who we become). We are a priori all of that.
I have never been able to say that I believe in past lives — belief seemed too strong a word. Still, I have known, since my earliest childhood, that these bodies, and these personalities, are not our lives. They are the raiments we’ve wrapped ourselves in while we live out this brief chapter.
I was five the first time I remembered a past life. In that life I was on a Scottish Moor in the 13th Century, watching the monks who had loved and sheltered me walk into the waters to their deaths. I stayed behind and lost my life in the Wars of Scottish Independence, which, if they were about anything, were about human dignity. Years later, I would find myself revisiting another past life, as a Cheyenne Indian in 18th Century Colorado. I was in love with a Union soldier and it didn’t go over well. One Google search later, I confirmed that the Cheyenne Indians were not from Colorado, and they aren’t there now, but they were there for a brief while, in the 18th Century. I don’t know what to make of this. I’m not sure I believe in past lives. But these stories help me make sense of the life I am living now, which has always, even when I looked away, been grounded in my deep desire to make a better world by helping to erase the lines that divide us.
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