What My Future in VT's Looking Like

I have been thinking about a great deal of things concerning the accidental, the intentional, and the coincidental, particularly in relation to family and to soil. Soil, a medium which I have spent a great deal of time thinking about over this past semester, is kind of like a physical documentation of everything that has historically happened to our earth, and contains all the information we have about our ancestors. The entire human race, from the lens of soil, starts to look like one family. This, to me, became very religious.

As I started to think about religion, I began to think about my background in general as well. While I believe we as humans have some kind of say in the direction of our lives, I also wonder if there isn't a sort of set path we are all on from the moment we are born. I wonder if the way children are raised, the influences that cause them to become the adults they will become, form a kind of familial fractal. The children are in some way like the parents. The parents are likewise like the grandparents. The children's desires and emotions are shaped by the parent's choices. This, to me, forms a pattern, as well as a spirituality behind our universality. 

The exact performance I am thinking of will be something like this: the audience will be directed off of the main path into the woods, and they will come across a space with several shallow pools (frames built from wood, mirrored on the inside with maybe some lights to cause the reflections to pop). I will be sitting in the largest pool and will be singing "As I went down to the river," a folk song popularized by Allison Kraus. I will ask audience members to come forward and I will wash their hands with a cloth from the pools. When I am done singing, I will stand and lead the audience through the woods to the next performer. My idea currently is to bring a bowl of water from the pools to bring to the next performer and wash their hands as well.

This references many ideas for me. The pools are symbolic of multiple paths and differences between people, although the pools themselves are all very similar. It is actually a direct reference to C. S. Lewis's The Magician's Nephew, when the lead characters, the discoverers of Narnia, come across a place filled with several shallow pools. Stepping into each pool would result in the discovery of another world. It symbolizes blind choice. Choices that we have yet cannot know the impact of. What is random? What is intended?

The song is a song I used to sing to my parents as a toddler. I knew all of the words by the time I was two. My father, being a writer, wrote a story about me singing that song, and to him, it meant everything I'd already overcome and everything I would have to overcome. To me now, I think of what we must all overcome as a race. How we must all put our differences aside in the light of a celebration of our sameness. This is definitely a very positive outlook on struggles that the human species is currently facing, and I am most certainly not downplaying those who fight for the right to live as equals. I am simply imagining the simplicity of equality in a perfect world.

A world of equality must mean that we must make choices to strive in that future, though we may not know the impact of our choices yet. We must do the best we can in the hopes of improving the species. That is the gist of what I'm thinking about right now.