You grow up thinking you are part of this place only to discover it doesn’t belong to you or your ancestors. Your heritage is somewhere else, far away. The string that tied you to that place was broken a generation ago. A sapling grows up in the only soil it knows. Home was comfort and love but it was a hothouse. The outside world as you emerge sees you as a stranger, a transplant or an unwanted species. To show that you are none of the above, you desperately try to conform. You want to be the beautiful flower that you are, not a weed.

But when you try to be something you’re not, you dig yourself into a hole. You are less and less of the ‘you’ that had started to emerge; yet you can never be the “you” others want you to be. Boxed in.

The green of our world is us photosynthesizing, transforming, never conforming to any standard but our own as we come to our senses about who we could be. We are part of this world whether it pleases anyone or not.