One of my favorite things to do in Germany is people watching. I map the faces of my family and my childhood to the faces I see walking by. We may have been separated by an ocean, and generations, and language, but our DNA remains linked. How our bodies express those genes still feels congruent, and somehow this pleases my soul.
Even if I’m shamed for not speaking Deutsch. The 45-day-streak of Duo Lingo just didn’t fully fit me out for my trip to the motherland last summer- ha! So I signed up for beginning language lessons at the German-American Society in Omaha last fall.
While I was in Germany last year, the words were familiar and foreign all at the same time, and that had me excited. Quick! Take on a new language as neuroplasticity wanes. Quick! Because this is a language that my people knew. However, my Great Grandpa Gerdes always told me that we spoke Low German, that is the language of the North rooted with the Frisian people, an ethnic group across the border into Holland and with migration ties to Scotland and England (which must explain why I’m such an Anglophile and lover of this colonizing, assimilated tongue, English).
I watch the old folks come for a coffee. Their routines and gates are recognizable. I watch the kids being biked to school. Their enthusiasm I recognize too. So much the same, and yet different.
On that trip, in my intimate relationships now, I am in the practice of noticing what’s the same, and what’s different. It is at the crux of relating to others, and differences are too rarely named in favor of group or social cohesion.
The colonizing impulses I and my ancestors absorbed so very often served to minimize or look away from anything that diverges and turn it into conflict. Homogeneity or “one right way” allows for such a myth of security – predictability even.
The myths that my ancestors absolved in the “new” home perhaps were for their survival, for their descendants’ steps forward. When it comes to migration stories, there are as many differences as there are people.
Taking our bodies to new places may be what’s the same, but how and why is and will remain full of mystery.
Let’s keep
noticing what
we don’t know,
so that we can keep relating.
***
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