#PrideOnThePage Day 2 Origin

I wasn’t planted. I endured, I chose, and I rose anyway.

This is my response to Day 2 of the PrideOnThePage challenge: ORIGIN

✨Plant your voice in the soil of your becoming. Let it grow wild.✨
Where did your voice begin? In geography, lineage, rupture, or myth?
Today’s prompt turns our attention to beginnings—not just where you came from, more like how you were formed. Root your words in what shaped you: the land, the silence, the stories told or withheld. What grows from your starting point?

Today I truly went into my creativity. I had these pictures in mind when I contemplated over today’s prompt.

The home of my life, Einbeck town hall, Buddha in Dambulla, Monument Valley 1997, DigitalArt TableMountain South Africa 2016, Me 2025, My late wife and me 2007 in Key West

Here is what arrived in Text and Digital Art:

Day 2: ORIGIN

My voice didn’t begin in safety.
It grew out of silence, through layers no one helped me name.
It formed in a house I will lose—not because I didn’t care, but because I did. Too much. For too long.
Because I thought it was mine to hold everything.
Because I had the means, so I gave them.
Because I didn’t ask what would happen if she died first, or if the company failed.
I signed to help. Not to disappear.
And still, part of me did.

I grew up in a city that never asked me who I was.
It asked me to follow. To function. To perform.
There was architecture, expectation, lineage.
What there wasn’t—was space.

And still, something in me grew wild.

There was a love. A life we built between lines we weren’t supposed to cross.
No title. No ceremony. Just 22 years of truth.

There were landscapes that didn’t belong to me, yet held me:
a canyon that felt like my own bones laid bare,
a mountain that reminded me I am because we are.
Not mine, and still—formative.

There was silence.
Not the peaceful kind. The kind that weighs more than words.
The kind that teaches you to disappear and still keeps watching.

And there was the thread.
That one through-line that never stopped pulling me back to myself.
Call it spirit. Call it creativity. Call it the wild.
It’s what stayed when everything else broke.

This is the soil my voice grows in:
not pure, not fertile, but real.
Rooted in love, rupture, refusal.
It grows crooked, tangled, unrepentant.
It doesn’t ask permission.

It just keeps growing.

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Four visual variations on the roots of my voice—layered across place, loss, devotion, and the wild thread that never let go. Almost the same image, different frequencies.

Geography. Lineage. Silence. Ubuntu. Grief. Becoming.

My origin is no single point on a map.
I was not born—I was assembled.
Out of pressure systems and missed signals.
Out of homes that held and hands that hurt.
Out of myth and storm and circuitry.

I am the satellite image of myself.
Always in motion.
Forecast uncertain.
Voice—wildly growing.

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