Spring Full Awakening Moon
“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.” – e.e cummings
This has always been top of the list for me, remain me. I’ve had my skirmishes with great levelers like alcohol, tobacco, marriage for no discernible reason, the cloak of ecclesiastics. Even after these resolved or faded into the background, I continued to struggle with that greatest beast of all for men, ambition. Fame. Honor. Wondering just when my gifts would finally gain recognition, the recognition they deserved. Didn’t occur to me until much later that they probably already had. Gained the recognition they deserved.
The drive to live into your true Self rather than plump up your persona, polish the ego is a strong one, but it often gets subducted, like a continental tectonic plate meeting another. This kind of movement, pushing the true Self far down, further into the dark center of Self, only increases the tremors when it finally becomes untenable, when the true self must out.
We can ever tell for ourselves how well we’re doing on this score because the persona and the ego set the original tender traps, honey pots of positive stroking, so our self evaluator is too often compromised. Analysis helps. So does a loving partner who will be honest while being kind. Friends of the same kind, help too.
Today though, as I live into my 63rd year, 63 long trips around the sun, it feels to me as if I generally live as my self, not as others would have me be, but as my own conscience guides. Hallelujah.
