Go big. Unfurl and take up all the space you can, like a seed cracking open and spreading ragged roots into the earth and green tendrils to the sky. Be loud like the morning finch — he may be tiny, but he has a voice that can reach the heavens and a golden chest filled with sunlight.
Don’t be afraid of what your song can do.
And when you are no longer scared of a pair of air-filled lungs and the spell they breath to life, go bigger than that.
Spread your arms wide and hold the Universe close. Find your story in the constellations that map our histories — what was, what is, what will be. Surely, your fate is written somewhere between the Big and Little Dippers. You have to become a giant if you want to reach those pin-pricks of light. They may have the answers you need, so you must risk expansiveness.
But that’s the catch: Sometimes your body has forgotten how to stretch.
What do you do then?
If you don’t know how to go big, go even smaller than you feel, so far inside yourself that you forget the outside world and instead make your home inside a four-chambered heart — don’t leave until you remember what it means to be a living, breathing being. Find yourself in the thump-thump of muscle and wet walls squeezing you tight.
When you feel even smaller than that, talk to the smallest thing you know. I asked a ladybug once how she felt about being no bigger than a sunflower seed. She just opened her polka-dotted wings and took flight. I knew what she was saying. She might be small, but she is red and fierce, and everyone knows who she is when she lands on their fingertips. You’d think she was being snippy, but I knew she was just stating a fact. Not that she cared much, either, if she were mistaken for a button or a bead. Her hard-shelled wings protected her from the inhumanity of indifference.
I talked to an elephant once, too, just to understand what it meant to be big. He didn’t seem to know he was a giant of an animal. By elephant standards, he was medium-sized, and, well, he didn’t spend much time thinking about those things when he could fill his mind with peanuts and hay and stories everyone else forgot.
Those lost memories were so powerful, he told me, so much larger than him that it didn’t much matter what size he was. I told him he might think he wasn’t much to look at, but he sure had big, beautiful ears, and he blushed at that. I knew he wouldn’t forget me, the same way I knew I’d always remember the time I made an elephant’s cheeks go red.
In fact, that average elephant with his gloriously large ears got me thinking about all the things I’d overlooked, all the things I’d never taken the time to listen to. So I spent some time with forgotten things and, though my ears are no bigger than tulip heads, I let them take in the whispers and quiet songs of the things we fail to notice as we go about life.
Take the plant called borage. An uncharitable name for a starflower. Does she care? Does it stop her from blooming violet and yellow flowers and making the earth around her sing with life? The bees don’t forget her, even if others can’t name her by sight. The hummingbird can’t get enough of her nectar, and so she makes more and more for him, eager to feel his tongue against her petals. There is beauty in the forgotten. Such freedom in being overlooked. So many things you can say and do when you learn the art of invisibility. Without it, she would have never known the hummingbird’s kiss.
So long as you know how to find yourself, she tells me, that is all that matters. So long as you give your attention to those who deserve it. Where do you think all her nectar comes from? The bees and the hummingbird fill her with pollen and the sky showers her in sunlight. It is their secret dance and it is enough that only they share it.
To everyone else, she is just another plant. To them? Divinity.
She plucks one of her violet flowers from her green, furry body and presses it against my tongue. I am grateful for her story and suddenly feel full and sweet. I wondered if this is how she feels when the bees settle in her center.
That night, I dreamt I found the constellation with my story written across it. It was like looking into the bottom of a star-speckled well or the inside of an apple. That’s all I can tell you — the rest is between me and the stars. And the violet flower coating the roof of my mouth.
Secrets, I’m learning, those private, quiet things, can be quite delicious.
One day, I stopped talking. Stopped asking questions. Stopped wondering how to quit feeling small and even gave up trying to change my size altogether. Instead, I let the silence fill up the space around me. I let the world around me grow large and full and technicolor.
I watched two black cats sprawled across a windowsill, tails lazily flicking back and forth. Noticed how they took up all the space they wanted, just like the silence. They would not consider themselves small. They would not stuff themselves into bad-luck labels, even if they did like stuffing themselves into boxes. They, like all sensible creatures, favor big hearts over small minds. They know you are lucky to bask in their presence.
And, somehow, they are right.
Now, I no longer think of myself as small. I am not confined by this skin or the pain others might press upon it. I am breath and heartbeat and the red blush of a ladybug’s kiss on my fingertip. I am the conversation with an elephant. The starflower in my mouth. The cats watching me write. I am not small, though I take up little space.
I am all the ways I touched the world just by being myself.
I am one word after another, spilling from my mouth, my pen, my heart.
I am the words I cannot speak.
I am the stories that have made me feel small, and I am the stories I will write to remember that I am big. I am the spaces — they get bigger and longer each time I feed them — when I forget to think about my place in the world and simply listen to the morning finch.
That bird.
He knows how to give me wings. He knows how to fill my chest with sunlight. I put down my pen and open the window above my writing desk to let his birdsong wash over me. In the end, this is all that matters:
His brilliant voice.
The big sky above us.
This small moment.
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