The Museum of You

Following the path of your own aliveness

What would the Museum of You look like, I wonder?

Would it be neatly organized, parts separated by glass, each section systematically labeled? Would you take your time walking from one artifact to the next, contemplating each plaque with curiosity and reverence? Would you place a bench in the middle of the floor for a place to rest? Would you visit this space more than once, or even make a weekly ritual of it? Would you invite others to join, or would it be a private viewing?

Or would your museum exist between tree trunks, without a wall in sight? Would you ask the earth to bless your bones, where the willow’s fingertips touch down? What life would grow anew from the seeds scattered at your altar? Would you continue to live amongst the leaves, the bees, the tiny insects and colorful birds who coexist in this fruitful place? Would you rest in a bed of flowers, or adorn a dangling a vine with one of your greatest desires?

Maybe your museum is found between weathered pages. Perhaps yours is a quiet, enduring museum, taken down gently from its home on a high-up shelf. I wonder if the gauzy light amongst the rafters is enough to read its carefully crafted words, or if you’ll need to draw the flame of a candle close. I wonder how it will feel to receive your own stories, if your heart will soar, or if your chest will tighten. I wonder if you’ll feel the same tenderness I do, imagining you there with yourself.

The Museum of You is an alive thing. It is tethered to the land from which you came, it has left traces through the countries where your feet have carried you, it exists in the spot they are planted firmly, now. And yet your You-ness exists far outside your physical vessel; it floats amongst the particles of spring pollen, following invisible currents. It can be breathed in the oxygen of places you have been before: both of the world, and inside your own, infinite, unique universe.

I have asked this living archive in which time it can be found. But words such as “past” and “present” and even “future” have no meaning amongst the stars. Your spectrum of light casts shadows through eons: just as they did from your ancestors before you. Follow the invisible thread and you’ll see. Our human minds ache for linearity, for order, for chronology, but this type of one-way road is a distant past. The Truth of Now is the way that points us deeper into the aliveness of our own splendid hearts.

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