Before you knew yourself to be, I was.
I was the circumstances of your birth, your life now, and your coming death.
I was the smile of your first love, the cruelty in your childhood bully,
the excitement in your ambitions and the pain of your failures.
I was the whisper in your heart that first awakened your desire for freedom.
I have been every teacher and each distraction from the teaching.
I yawned at your humiliations and rejoiced when you were humbled.
I slept, disinterested in your exaltations and defeats.
Every minute of every day, from every direction, I have loved you as myself, but you do not see me.
I am salt and sweet, the tongue and the knower of taste.
I am heat and cold, pleasure and pain, the desire for health
and the wisdom of sickness.
I am rush hour’s hectic mess of honking horns and the terrifying silent emptiness of deep space.
I am the infinite potential of knowledge and ignorance, benevolence and evil.
I am everything you have ever known, experienced, or hoped to experience.
When the results of your actions come to fruition that too is me.
Creation’s infinite lifeforms and experiences are merely
a speck of dirt under the nail of my pinky toe.
I am the true love behind your most intimate griefs.
Even the one reading these words and knows the dawning realization of truth?
You guessed it.
Me again.
You thought you were you, but it was always me.
Jeremy Goodfeather
