Today I passed by a really beautiful arrangement of trees - it’s a bit hard to tell from the photo, but they’re aligned in parallel like soldiers marching in an army:
I looked at it again and instead of grown trees, I saw a scene from several years prior to present day. An unnamed, faceless person meticulously placing seeds into the ground, checking every so often to ensure symmetry. I will probably never meet them, but I met their mark on the world today.
And it was breathtakingly beautiful.
Lin Manuel-Miranda, anyone (or maybe Alexander Hamilton)? From “The World was Wide Enough”:
Legacy. What is a legacy?
It’s planting seeds in a garden you’ll never get to see.
Hiding somewhere in the trees whose planter is unnamed, I saw Hamilton as a (complicated) public servant, and Manuel-Miranda as a (self-evident) rhetorical genius.
I saw another arrangement of trees not too long after. Same person (or people)? I’ll never know.
The Camino credits the thousands of volunteers who work tirelessly to maintain albergues, stamp credentials for pilgrims, keep churches open, and more.
Did these people make the list? This scenery made my day.
Actually, I can’t find a list. Just a ballpark number. But I don’t think I needed a list to appreciate the collective impact.
I found myself today, as I finished the last tough walk of the Camino (the last two are both less than 20km), daring to imagine the enormity of effort and sacrifice and collaboration necessary for my journey to be an ounce of what it has been. I found myself visualizing the world around me, being built up around me by the people who made it happen and their families and friends, as I bent time forward and backward like I could run a time lapse with my eyes.
I found myself admiring the beauty in legacy through impact, not just in face or name recognition.
There are only a few faces uncensored by our history books. Only a few names underlined, only a few figures put under the light. Through money, influence, power, or more, they shine brightest and echo loudest. If everyone’s face was spotlighted, everyone’s name was highlighted, and everyone’s figure out there sharing the stage, would the faces become faceless, names nameless, figures just amorphous forms?
What’s the point highlighting the whole book?
There are millions of names for streets, universities, scholarships, parks, and art museums. Doesn’t it feel just a bit saturated?
The optimist in me, newly inspired by the scenery of the walk today, dares to wonder if past a critical density of name and face saturation, we start to appreciate legacy by impact first, and stop paying attention to the largely white and male faces who either care enough or have the means to make their names and appearances known to the world. Who perhaps dress their atrocities in philanthropy to make them palatable.
And maybe for this saturation to actualize, we first need to start seeing more of the names and faces that represent who the US has become and is becoming. Maybe we first need to uncensor faces of all ethnicities and underline names of all backgrounds to correctly color our understanding of the word “impact,” before it can exist on its own. Color aware before colorblind.
The world is wide enough for everyone’s mark to appear. As ornament or scar, or a bit of both. If a world exists where scars can’t be covered up by greed, and where ornaments can’t be tarnished out of spite, I am inspired to build a bridge.