SEPTEMBER 2026 SULLYGRAM:  Have you ever seen clouds fall? Not mist rise, but clouds fall? Happened to me. Moist caresses suddenly touched my upturned face and vaporous fingers startled my soul, even as a zone of towering oaks lorded over me. Yesterday’s sojourn into the woods and up summer’s verdant climbs was a step into cosmic origins. I closed my eyes and discovered that there are moments when you can place one foot in infinity while the other remains on terra firma. Fact: stardust once came to this little blue oasis called Earth and magically transmuted itself into my atoms…and yours.  

We are aliens. Born to the same planet, we yet live in multiple worlds. Tribes, societies, nations do not necessarily come together over time. In fact, they tend to become discrete islands in a collective ocean, separate rooms in a single castle, far flung cultures estranged by circumstance, habit, choice. Yes, we trace our branches to the same family tree, nesting in each other arms like matryoshka dolls; but it goes beyond that.

Even if our childhood is a succession of classrooms with the same familiar faces, we accumulate separate contexts like a book adds chapters. From the cozy togetherness of a feeder early elementary, we matriculate to a high school where peer group pressure splinters into cantons of personal interests and activities, and we plant our flag.

Only…some of us don’t run up a flag, a pennant, a group ensign. And those that do will almost certainly search around in later years trying to re-group under a banner that has ceased to exist. We move too many times to swear allegiance, perhaps pass through families like revolving doors, see too many differences – races, customs, values, or hear too many accents, jargons and languages. Some part of us becomes an observer tuned to shadows and echoes, maybe wondering if we ever had a flag. My multiple worlds looked something like that very early on. I had lived in a dozen countries before I turned six.

There are lots of ways to be loved and accepted, and I was denied nothing. Biases favored a little platinum blond toddler in South America, and my father used to tell how villagers in places as remote as mountains in Brazil would point at me, declaring “rubio, rubio!” I couldn’t have appreciated the fact that “Evita,” legendary wife of dictator Juan Peron, used to pat me on the head at embassy functions in Argentina, but when I saw the movie and the Broadway play, I understood that the world had spoiled me rotten. Loving parents, plenty of friends, an all-border passport to enter in (without really entering in) anywhere. If such a movable feast gave me a false concept of what the world was like, it made it easy to read the blind motivations and bedrock premises that differentiate groups and individuals. I guess you could call that a third place to stand.         

Of course, I believed everyone saw through the same lens back then. A grave error. If the universe exists in each grain of sand, I saw it as one desert. Still make that mistake sometimes. But I tend to understand very well those aliens whose slog through life misses every oasis.

If you are as rootless as all that, parsed into worlds and lives like those islands, rooms and planets I mentioned a few paragraphs ago, you probably know what I’m talking about. If not, you may yet be aware that there are stand-alones like that, and you may hate them, pity them, or sometimes adversely aspire to be one. There is a certain insight that comes with such fluidity – when you don’t belong anywhere, you belong everywhere – but in order to access it you must forfeit the socialization that comes from sameness.   

And if the world arrives late, asking how you became you, demanding to know what you can’t possibly explain in non-alien talk, the real you will survive all that, rising above paltry trade-offs and pretty lies. You can’t live your past and enter your future at the same time. It’s there in your closet waiting to be discovered, tailor-made and unique. You.

Just link the dots of what you’ve learned and distill them in a brew. Quaff it. And when you’ve drilled that glass, then you may read the dregs like tea leaves. They are your finished puzzle, your x-ray, your mirror. And the person you see will not be the hideous portrait of some Dorian Gray hidden away in your attic, but a beautiful soul deep with context, revealed in clues to those you let in. Now you can plant your flag.

I see more than a few like that of all the people I knew. People who outgrew themselves, surpassed the myths of their upbringing, and let go of trendy gods they once bowed down to. Everyone should know at least one such nonconformist, someone unique among uniqueness without trying to be. I think they come from the dust of special stars, and perhaps they will travel on to new worlds when they leave this one.

Photo below is my paternal grandfather and moi. Captain and cabin boy. We are on the deck of one of the Great Lake freighters he Mastered in his 42 years at the helm. He started as a cabin boy, age 13, in our nautical family. All the Sullivan males sailed. All rose in the ranks – deckhands, first mates, and in my father’s case a navigator, then Lieutenant Commander and a secret Intelligence role in South America during WWII that I’m just starting to find out about… Tight-lipped family. I’d tell you, but my lips are sealed. I’m still a cabin boy.

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan