Composed February, 2018
Where I’m From
Pin point it on a space-time map:
1:05am
Friday, August 17th, 1973
Charlottetown,
Prince Edward Island,
Canada,
Planet Earth,
Earth-Moon System,
Solar System,
Milky Way Galaxy,
Local Group,
Virgo Supercluster,
The Observable Universe.
Breathe and hold-
One final laborious push and I appeared in the maternity ward of the Charlottetown Hospital where both my paternal grandmother and my mother had trained and worked as Roman Catholic nurses.
Me,
Gillian Marie McGuigan,
first born of five,
their singular
Gold Cup and Saucer parade girl I was that day.
My mom, nurse angel, is a
creative, loving and giving homemaker;
my dad, the endless provider, a
quiet and detailed problem solver/computer geek.
Both artistic and so hard working.
But they are not the whole truth of where I’m from.
I’m from the same myriad of places which each in their own way have brought us all into existence.
Trace your fingers on the bark of an evergreen nearest you and you will feel the rough and willing touch of ancestral longing.
A longing which is etched into each of us for the preservation of a species that was perhaps not ever destined for more than a maybe answer to where we are headed and, despite science and religion's best efforts, to why we are here.
If three hundred years ago you had told my ancestors in Ireland, Scotland and Africa that I would be sitting here today laced with cellular remembrances of their homelands, same starlight in my eyes as theirs,
yet looking and living as I do, no doubt they would think you crazy.
But I am here and I did come from their distant histories by an entanglement of story lines that only a skilled author could render.
And what if someone then was told we’d know where humankind found its origins? And also, that during the same relative time/ space as that wild discovery, too many descendants of those humans who lived so desperately close to Earth would be at least partly to blame for the ridiculous mess we are in today as perpetrators of greed and a foolhardy disconnection with same Earth.
Would they have thought you crazy?
Do you think we are crazy now?
And what is crazy anyhow?
Climate change and a sixth mass extinction?
Guns, warfare, inequality, grinding poverty, endless growth?
Measuring our worth according to GDP?
Measuring worth at all?
Opti-genetics on transgenic mice?
Nano-robots fighting cancer?
TLC?
What about falling so wildly in love with an idea that you would walk off the face of the earth just to see if the idea might float?
What about falling in love, period.
Where I am from is two people who met by chance, fell hopelessly in love, and in time, decided to hop in the sack together.
I am the end result of one of those encounters; a kind of give and take only possible through courage and naivety combined. That and the biochemistry of hormones.
Where I am from is truly a strange and beautiful place with a graceful and stumbling quality about it.
A world so full it can scarcely contain it all:
Family and community and brokenness and wholesomeness too.
Wonder and love and fear and bliss,
Wide, bright expanses and dark cramped quarters, and unknown
wounds in far away lands and far back times.
I am from small talk in small towns on an achingly beautiful little bit of fading away sandstone in a great big, turbulent sea.
I am from some sort of wonderful orchestral wavelength that an ancient part of me knows is truth and beauty.
That and the unequivocal forbearance of spirals and fractals as well as the survival of heartbreak and other dis-ease.
And if I thought any of it was especially special I would have said so already.
Except I did.
My mom and my dad are ultimately where I am from.
That and an endless universe of possibilities
of which I am both one and many.
Jill MacCormack
Thanks for reading this throw back from three years ago.
Be well,
Jill