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This weekend in San Francisco is the large, outdoor music festival called Outside Lands. It's odd because I think of San Francisco as a city of outsiders. Many of us black sheep who didn't belong where we were and sought greener, weird pastures beyond. I recently found this story/myth I wrote a year ago, and in an effort to share more of my personal writing and not just astrologically related stuff...figured would share it here.
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Once upon a time there was an alien in a spiral galaxy far, far away. Everyday this alien woke up and felt disoriented, confused about where she was and why. Nothing made sense, even her family, food, the language, or anything. Sometimes at night when others were asleep she would stare into the mirror at her own eyes and wonder where she came from and why she was here.
In times of particular confusion, she would ask other beings who weren’t like the others in hopes they would have something to tell her. So asked the trees, and the flowers, and birds, and even the cat. No one had answers for her. She knew they were inside of herself, but every time she tried to look, she felt more lost.
Sometimes when she did this, a tingle on her forehead would be shaped like a star. So she would wander outside to the night sky and ask for answers. The only one she ever received was to wait. She wanted a different response, she wanted guidance and someone or something to tell her what to do. For some reason her radar seemed off course, she assumed there was something deeply wrong with her. How did she end up here? Was it all by mistake?
Her parents would read her the story of the Ugling Duckling and even took her to see ET, perhaps to make her feel more at home. Though then she started to think she was born on the wrong planet and in the wrong galaxy. Perhaps that would explain her confusion. What she didn’t understand was if there could really be an entire group of others just like her. That made her sad that would make her less special, but also relieved that she wasn’t alone.
As she got older her otherness only became more obvious to herself and others. So she slowly began going farther and farther away from her family and friends. First it was just one galaxy away, then slowly it was more and more. Til she found herself in an entirely unfamiliar, yet very familiar place.
Here she met interesting beings who also weren’t like others and those she grew up with such as unicorns, mermaids, wolves, harpies, witches, and dragons of whom seemed to belong, but weren’t related or similar. It was an island of lost toys, perhaps Atlantis. It was there she learned that the word alien comes from Proto-Indo-European root al- meaning "beyond." These beings were different, but that the things she did and said weren’t so foreign to them. She was similar to them, they too seemed to not belong and related in more meaningful ways. She didn't have to split off or ignore parts of herself here in order to be accepted.
Slowly she began to notice that she was similar to everyone else, but still different. It was relieving that she could have a place to belong, but not be held down by needing to stay similar. Often when she would talk to them her forehead would tingle and she would try to hide it. The tingling was a thread that looped around and through among all of them…it was love.
With some beings the tingling happened more and with others, much less. She still had times of feeling alone and misunderstood, but stayed in connection by allowing the thread of love to stretch instead of removing herself. At night she would often go out onto her roof and stare at the sky and the millions of swirling galaxies...some of them spiral, some elliptical, and some even irregular. And now when she would ask for answers, it was always the same. The stars twinkled and whispered “you’re home.”