We often ask ourselves who we are. We search. We find. We lose grasp of ourselves … and then we look some more. We develop a sense of our identity from patches of notions steeped in whimsical memories of long ago … or in razor-edged fragments of experience we have gained over the years. We assemble ourselves and then behold our grand psyche … or our refined psychosis. We really have no clue and eventually attack ourselves for our own ignorance.

I like t think that I used to know who I was, long ago … long before I could sense others. Long before they would reach out with their claws and talons to whisk me away far from myself … far from my nature … far from my true being. Poor me. Poor poor pitiful me.

To purgatory they sent me and hung me out to dry … to wither into dust … reminding me all the while that that’s all I was: dust. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust … to my death … a release from this world … a false world, or so they said. And so to reinforce this illusion they gave me a false God … and then for my own good they fed me insecurity … a steady stream of hemlock chock full of self-delusion … all in the name of love. Love God. Fuck God. (Pregnant pause) … Poor God. He … she … it … (non-word) … had nothing to do with it.

Now taking the Lord’s name in vain is a sin, ain’t it? Such hypocrites! That was my first clue. They tried to expunge me of myself. And yet, the ‘I’ of me remained … smiling … somewhere locked away deep inside their prison … eventually a cell of my own making. Its damp floor, dank with the spirit of all the Kool-Aid I eventually would spill on the floor.

And now, I find myself wanting to sing of air and clouds, and it’s the lousy dust that drags me back to … not to earth … but to a pain filled grave. Yes, I refuse to blame the ‘earth’ any longer. I refuse to tread on ‘nature’ and paint it full of sarcastic bile laced metaphors just to appease my ego, or to stoke the embers of my pain. Poor mother nature, always the unwitting door mat. So easily we wipe our feet on her before stepping into our sterile mausoleums.

So much spent energy is misplaced trying to ‘realize’ who we are. Does it really matter in the end? The answer: of course not! We spend our lives desperately trying to both live with ourselves and escape from ourselves. We project our two-faced duality onto others, carpet bombing our relationships with our neurosis.

Drowning in expectations, we ask too many questions. Perhaps after all, my nature is not what I think it to be. Perhaps it’s just a habit of my own design. Perhaps I should just let go and ‘be’. No more questions asked. Just relax … and ‘be’.

I’m fine. How are you?

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