Family: it is the reason I am here. To be with Iris, to be with my brother, my sister-in-law (shield sister), and it is for myself, to be stronger, more independent, taking a flight by myself, caring for another human by myself, so that I may be a stronger member to turn around and help my family again. It all comes around. What goes into yourself, goes into the group, the back, the bond, this family.

And it is everywhere, the sense of family, and the sense of the self in the family: the individual in the whole. The headstrong all lead at once the pack that charges ever onward over the rolling hills that show never ending hardship and endless reward for a good work done. It is a heated wave of reality and comfort in what can be done with your own hands and with the right hearts beating in the heavy breathing chests of the people running down the street to get to their jobs in the towering silver buildings and that comes billowing through the opening doors and the ones kept open with outstretched arms my strangers and rolls off the rooftops onto the people below: everyone knows their place here.

You see it in the cars that fill up the highway trying to get home to their families, or the silence and still that reminds the individual they have so far to go before they can give something great back to the great family around them, and to start by making their own mind and resting body a family to confide in at the end of the day. And, the others split off like branches from the family tree, on their way to find themselves, sprout leaves that waiver and touch upon the other spreading branches, sending off a signal to call upon the splitting pack like a tower sending invisible messages through the air: always the loner meets just who they are supposed to, and the branch grows together again when they find themselves.

I am one of the people in one of the cars on the way home, not my home, merely an observer to the way of life and the way of the people around me as I visit, and watch. I am on my way to my family, too. One far flung and away from my home, though the feeling of the individual among the crowd, just as important as the mass, and whose growth is crucial to the family's structure, finds its way through the cracks in the window to let in the air. I understand it, and the understanding that took its flight first from the skies and down to the trees now rests on my shoulders, and in my solemnity, I know just what I am supposed to do. I am supposed to grow, and flow like the hills we divide by the miles we collect under the wheels of dark blur that is our car on the highway. I am a piece to the whole, a necessity to the end, and a goal for the beginning to reach for. And I shall reach for new beginnings.

It's a pay-it-forward bond. Pay it to the ones who raised you by become the greatest of your kind, the only you there is or was to be, and give the ones beneath you a hand up to the next pier, and for their own good, don't tell them how many arrows will come flying at them: just tell them what at arrow looks like, and how fast it may fly, or how slow. The work-in-progress knows to never take away a chance to grow from another, they never take up their own sword in someone else's battle.

Tennessee makes you grow, or else you sit with nothing. The only reason you are left behind is that you didn't try. You didn't bleed for your dreams, you didn't see yourself as part of the family, the great pack of individuals all becoming greater. The tree, the family of people who smile politely, but doesn't ask your business or your secrets, who nods silently in place of conversation, have only room for the individual willing to earn something, the one wanting to become something. And the family grants it, after the blood, after the tears. The ones who don't try lay as small pebbles beneath the tree, stacked up in little clumps here and there, but too hay to catch the wind the leaves ride and the branches hold steadfast through.

There are many cities like Nashville, the epicenter of growth in Tennessee, many states that carry the same ideal, but none that I have been to have shown me this sense of brotherhood and reward out of hardship before. It is, to say the least, emboldening. Of course, the feeling s only adopted and dispelled by the city, the state. It is not made here. It is made in people. People like me, like you in all your books or piles of your child's laundry or years of work ahead of you. The idea of greatness is taught arond the world, but it is acceptd, it is made, bi us.