To be human is to grieve. It is to mourn loss of childhood, of innocence, of times when things were a little more simple. It is two moon lovers that made you promises and then let go of your hand. It is to watch your strong father grow weak with illness, and realise that men are not mortal. It is to cup the small heel of your child in your warm hands and know that this time will pass, grieving before the end has even begun. It is to walk along the beach where even the wind cannot dry the tears on your face. It is to feel heaviness on your chest that nothing will remove, it seems, until an indiscriminate amount of time has passed and you are out of salt.
It is to want to protect the little things that you think are important, like white rhinos that become extinct anyway, or the ocean that you love as a mother, a lover, a friend. It's to hold tiny rabbits in your hand and release them, even though you know they'll return and eat your lettuce. It's to want to chain yourself to logging trucks, but instead bring boxes of chocolate and milo and rice and to those who are doing it for you instead, because you can't right now, because you have a child to look after. It's to do your best, every single day, except the days when you can't, and even then, it's all we can do.
To be human is to feel frustration so deeply that your jaw clench is along with your fists. It is to want things done yesterday and not tomorrow, where you know the opportunity will be lost. It is to speak and not be heard in the way that you intended. It is to try and do the right thing, but instead be misunderstood, and all your efforts are merely paper planes caught in storms.
To be human means to feel joy. It is to recall the openness of childhood where unrestrained enthusiasm pores out of your heart and causes your hands to wave like little birds and diamonds to sparkle in your eyes so that this joy passes to everyone around you, who would yelp and squeal and exclaim if only they had remembered how. It is the tiny corners of your mouth that cannot help but turn up wards. It is the little things that you forgot you loved, like the way the skin of of a giraffe's neck folds in waves, or stepping out of the car on a crisp cold winter's night with whiskey in your belly and to look up and see a shooting star when you had forgotten that they existed at all. It is feeling the pulsing of the Earth around you so that you can feel your heartbeat with alongside it, as if nothing else exists but you and the wildness and beauty of all there is. It is rainbows. It is turning vinyl and beating drums at dawn as the dust eddies around your barefeet and a friend transfers kisses to your brow with glitter lined lips. The tiny unfurling of a fern frond, the rustling of a puppy, the first flowers that come out in spring when you weren't watching them, the card that drifts in with the post from far away to tell you that you are loved.
To be human is to feel shame. It is to take this shame and wrap it in a thousand layers of tissue paper, and place it in the bottom drawer, and to find that when you return to this dark and dusty room, that thin and mute coloured layers of paper are strewn all of across the floor and covered in blood, as if you had never wrapped it at all. It is too late to do anything to pretend that this does not exist and that it never happened and that you were somebody else or it happened to somebody else. It is to feel that you are not good enough and that someone will discover your lies and they will know that you've been Faking It All Along.
To be human is to feel lonely. It is to crawl into a cold bed at night and pull a pillow close and wrap your arms around it and as you fall asleep and dream of the body that you miss. It is to stand in a crowd and feel distance between you and everyone else, even though you can smell their perfume, their sweat, the detergent with which they wash their clothes and you can hear all the voices chattering but none of them singing your tune. It is to long for those that you are sure you once shared some cosmic womb with, because they will understand just what you were thinking when you touch them lightly on the forearm with your fingertips to catch their attention.
To be human is to be curious. It is a toddler walking along with their mother and picking up all the leaves and the gum nuts that everybody else has just stepped on over. It is to wonder at the shapes between the stars and the stars that no one can see and that exist only in our imagination. It is to pull apart the kettles and the clocks and the transistor radios and the car engines and all the books off the shelves to find what lies within. And when that is done, it is the gentle asking of questions and the inquisitive probes that draw the information out of others, who might gift you with the things that you are after. It is to pull the prism from it's velvet box and spin it so the light refracts in as many dimensions as possible with all the colours breaking into the space that seemed so dull only moments before.
To be human is to be vulnerable. It is to rip the buttons off your velvet coat so everybody can see the shabby clothes you wear beneath and to discover that they love you because of it not in spite of it. It is to know that in your vulnerability you will be hurt, but with this will come growth and gemstones.
To be human is to feel empathy. It is too so completely wrap yourself in the skin of another the every nerve ending feels the pain of another. It is to imagine what it must be like to lose a child, to flea a war zone, to feel nervous before an exam, to risk exposure, to want to leave and want to stay at the same time, to be persecuted , disadvantaged, shut out of the boundaries of the land in which they grew up with no way of returning to find the ones that they left behind with holes in their shoes and sad stories to tell. It is to feel the nerve endings in your legs twitch and scream, when the one you love comes to you with a hand sliced open and a plea for a bandaid.
To be human is to love. It is to lean in to the warm coat of your lover whilst the south winds blow salt air in your face and feel his arms around you and know that he will do what he can to keep you warm. It's the invisible umbilical cord that connects to you to your grown child, now a man, who's become the person you dreamt he would be two months before he was even conceived.
**To be human is to engage with all this richness of life, and to fully live it, and to forgive oneself when one seems to do it wrong. **To trust strangers, though one once stole your rent money. To give money to strangers on the other side of the world that need it more than you. To make mistakes and find blessings in them.
And to be, to be, and to be, until it is not to be, and you must let go.
This is my response to the 
question of the week "What does it mean to be human". Thank you to 
for giving us this question and to 
for organising it all with so much love.
For Ini
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