Monday, August 07, 2017
Finding Your Identity––poem by Dorothy
Finding Your Identity
At first you think
you are a real being,
someone to be seen
and reckoned with.
The world now must
do your bidding,
or face the consequences,
your howls, your screams,
your tantrums of disapproval.
A bit later you discover
that there are others
demanding the same kind
of acquiescence,
your cannot all play with
the same toys at once,
or be first on the slide
or merry go round.
Then you grow a bit
and realize that
not everything is
the way it has been
presented to you.
Your read Thoreau
and learn that some simply
sleep walk through life,
and never wake from
the pervasive cultural trance.
You start to break rules,
test boundaries,
try to find out
who you really are.
You keep on following
this line of thought
until one day you realize
you do not fit in.
You love poetry,
Bach, Mozart,
Emerson and Dante.
You read the myth
of the shadows in Plato's cave
and the universal charade is obvious.
Now you are well outside the norm,
you get more and more isolated from rest.
You follow your bliss,
select your own lifestyle,
no longer care
what the others think.
Then something happens
that shatters your mind.
You discover that you in fact
do not really exist,
you are part of a vast ocean
of being
swirling through the cosmos,
inextricably connected with
everyone else who are also mirages,
phantoms caught in this heaving sea
of reality called love
and that is who you are.
Dorothy Walters
August 6, 2017
