I Am Not Who I Think I Am

As much as I might wish it to be, as much as I can become sentient of is only a sliver of the miracle that swirls about me. So much life is required in the form of bacteria and fungi in my intestinal flora, to help me eat my food, that they too are part of who I am. Bacteria host. I have been a yeast lord as well, during my brewing days hundreds of gallons of wort required billions of yeast colonies to be cultured and cared for. We are each a vast resource for other life and the flourishing of certain species over others. There are healthy intestinal cultures that benefit from all the things our mothers told us to eat, leafy greens and fiber, fruits, nuts and healthy fats. On the other hand, sick intestinal environments that have to cope with being well-oiled by hard oils and necrotic from too much corn sugar, gluten or just de-mineralized flours that have been enriched are just plain bad for humans. Not only do we indiscriminately kill off our own beneficial residents, but their culture has the ability to produce about 40-60% of our immune function!

So, on one level I am just stardust, animated and 85-90% water, but as organism, I become environment for a host of living creatures. Learn to love yours back to health. If your innards are ill, you will be outwardly unwell as well. Learn to cultivate healthy intestinal flora. Find out what kills it and use healthier methods for healing that do not require you to kill off the healthy bacteria as well as the unhealthy ones.

I am sure that whatever "understanding" I come to about who I am will collapse upon further inspection, each preconception about myself is but a facade, a scrim between "me", the person I call myself and the rest of the world. Emblazoned on the outside, the scrim, when lit shows them who I want them to see, but inside shines a light that is beyond even my comprehension, that makes that image disappear and surprises whatever conception of myself I have more often than not. Some of those things that would seem easy to convey, like saying I'm a husband, or a father or a shaman are limiting. Just to point out a few routes to knowing my husband aspect, The original word from which husband derives, house bound is true for me. I am bound to the house in such a way that it is my responsibility. I was handfasted to the love of my life over a year before we formalized our marriage with the clerk of courts and our whole family. Even though our handfasting was enough for us, we wanted to include the family. Frequently I am amazed that after a dozen years, I still feel the depth and breadth of our love expanding. Sometimes I surprise myself, again that person I thought I was by becoming something else as well.

It feels like no matter how close I get to pinning down who I actually am there is always a new aspect or quality that I find I never noticed before and the learning curve is steep again in learning who I truly am. Some might get complacent and stop looking at themselves so closely, but as I grew up, there were few things that remained constant, only my own company was to be counted on. So many, many mental gymnastics, so many lonely moments to fill, but I taught myself to multiply three digit numbers in my head and understood the healing power of the woods better than most. again, slivers of who I really am. Each of these could be plumbed for hours, exploring the myriad ways that I continue to blossom, always into a person who I would, or would have been be proud to know or to have as a friend, but even my old nickname, God's Exterior Decorator, as much as it says exactly who I am, it is but a tiny bit of grit on the sandpaper which I truly am.

I know myself enough to know when I am lying, especially when I'm doing it to myself and am always glad to be called out on my dramas and strife. Most of it is imagined. I even have been trying to learn who I really am regarding my politics, because I get the feeling that I am growing into a new person in that respect as well. Living in the North has always meant one thing to me, above all others, One must do many more than just one thing. Like the forest, you have to have many moods and many seasons. We are in maple syrup moon and then planting moon, and on around the year. Within the person I call me is the part that honors this time signature of life. One week I might be the groundskeeper, huntsman, jester, chef, dishwasher and steward, each at alternate turns, but the "me" doing any of those things is only hinted at by any of those terms.

As I age, I'm in my second half-century now, I learn to lay more and more traps for the part of me that is hung up on defining myself. sometimes I catch myself running a racket on myself before I even have the chance to fully formulate one. I waste less time trying and more time is left over for doing, even if that act is a state of being still. I have learned that no one really multi-tasks, we act like we do, but our attention, being finite must be constrained to doing one thing to the best of ones ability. I do, as you might expect test that limit from time to time, but am always reminded that it is always better to do just one thing.

I am not my synapses, however I am often tempted to claim that they are all that I am. The closer I get to understanding who I really am, the more drastically things seem to change. It appears that we are each a sort of prismatic fractile, a whirlwind or vortex that reflects and refracts the light of creator. How we dance with the Light, how we resolve the darkness upon which we define ourselves, the luminosity of our BE-ing is our legacy and determines the health and welfare of the entire interdependent systems that we call life on this planet, perhaps those effects resonate beyond our sun, perhaps even pour Universe. As a child, I went to many, many drug houses, but what I noticed most was that the tee-vee was always on with the sound off and usually acid rock would be blaring on the hi-fi. I always wondered how the two would be in synch. Until I heard of "Om" I had no word for the universal frequency, what science later described as the residual noise, detectable with instruments now), from the big bang. We are stardust, yet we are each so much more.

All of this up to now has been about internal conceptualizations and ideas, beyond my skin and synapses are the hundreds of thousands of discreet actions that my physical form has taken, from flirting glances to deep penetrating stares, from helping an old lady with her groceries while she opened her door to changing the tires of some stranded travelers. The, perhaps, millions of choices I have made are part of what make me who i am, but the hundreds of thousands of people i have met and spoken with, spent time relating to them, each has helped me to become who I ultimately am, who I hope to become and who I will dream and love into being with serious intent, as well as action. As the bastard translation of Aramaic, Abracadabra is meant to mean, "I speak into being" when we step into flow, all else is vanquished by the immediacy of the moment. Artists and musicians frequently describe this as time stand still or nothing else matters, but it is even more than the subjective experience of it. When I am most aligned with where I want to be, in that flow, the defined person that is spoken of as "I" is superseded by having tapped into something eternal. With luck, and I believe, a purity of purpose, perhaps more light passes through me in ways that enlighten and inform others that getting to know themselves on a deeper level is worth the time spent inspecting the dark sides of our beings.

For most, the word "occult" is scary and fills them with trepidation. It just means hidden. Never be afraid of who you though you were. More importantly, don't be afraid to unmask yourself to/for yourself, whoever emerges will be stronger and more aware afterward. Catching yourself lying to yourself, or running games on your perception need to always be questioned and inspected carefully. chances are they have been created for someone you grew out of long ago. A wise person once led me through the difficult journey of describing myself to myself and along the way he would point out the sign posts, like "How long do you want to feel that way?" or "Do you want to think like that?" He asked me "How long do you want to have that dragging you down?" and "How long do you want to live like that?" Each and every thing that we think, comes from somewhere and what I am saying is that to really look into those things, that led you to define things in certain ways, events that twisted your vision or were mis-heard, are not, in fact, you. They may help define you for some purposes or others, but they van never touch who you really are, who I really am or who any of us are. The only thing that I can truly say for sure about who I am is perhaps the least important thing of all. That when I die, I will feed a miraculous web of life in addition to leaving a legacy of love amongst the people.