Identity is a sneaky rascal. ‘I am not’ can become one as easily as mother, feminist, father, actor, actress. It seems to be a last ditch effort of the character to ensure the movie’s not cancelled, to set a hook in the ephemeral screen, in video gameland. What is it that is desired so primally, so pile driven down into the earth’s core, that is so basic to the dream that we claw and scrape in allegiance to our storyline? What’s so inspirational about this stage of opposites that seems to cry out for another curtain call?

Is it not Life itself?

I watch creation’s heroes living loving struggling within the dream and compassion wells up: for us, for our dear hearts, for the unique and perfect path each one travels, for the many painfilled heartbreaks wrought by life’s unending twists and turns, for all the hard work for there is no harder work than being here while believing in separation, for the silent suffering – unconsciously silent or perhaps more wearing, more wearying, stoically stilled.

I watch and stand in awe. This is the work of ages, the work each soul completes before the deeper work ensues. Life exhausts us, wears us down like water on a canyon wall, proves to us that we cannot control its flows. It will twist and turn and we will be swept along in life’s torrent of undoing regardless of how many boulders of identity we grasp.

I don’t know which is more demanding — believing that we have control, that we are a someone, unconscious of what is actually happening here or when we are consciously aware that there is nothing we can do to stop life’s unfolding, that we will stand and take it, regardless of what events and experiences come our way.

We act in alignment with our nature. As that nature is clarified, stripped clean by life’s torrent of experience, the actions naturally, organically shift. Life here takes us from animal nature to true nature with its flood of grandeur … and all life is nothing but that … beautiful, poignant, inspiring, heart-shattering, stunningly magnificent.

Bowed humbly to each and every expression of This I Am.