Family

A post to my middle daughter:

Family is the most basic and essential element of who and what we are.  Individuals are themselves due to many factors, but the first is their inheritance from their family.  If physically related, the very genes that form your body and personality are shared, and even this is not so, the  most formative elements of our very selves, good or bad, come from our family.

Family can be a joy or a burden, but it is a part of us.  We can accept, embrace, reject or deny our family, but they are always with us and within us.  I often quote Robert Frost's Death of the Hired Man.  -- Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. --  Sometimes even this essential reality is denied, but in doing so, one rejects parts of himself or of herself.  You can keep your family physically away from you, but their influence  and their presence in your soul are permanent.

Ideally, family is our joy and our refuge, our reason for being and our fulfillment.  No family is perfect, but each family is the possession and the personal nation of the individual.

Family is the foundation of our existence, the road to meaning in our lives, the reason to continue to live, the expression of our faith.  Family is the skeleton that gives us form, the heart that circulates our love, the brain that gives us purpose, the soul that makes us human.  Family is why I live and why I will keep on living.  

To deny your family is to deny yourself.