Vachon Imagined

If you and I were to walk through a forest together, and I pointed to a stone and said, “This is a rock,” or cupped water in my hands and told you what it should feel like against your skin, you might begin to repeat my words. You would remember my descriptions. You could even teach them to someone else.

But you would not yet know them for yourself.

This is how we are raised. We become products of our environment. Children imitate their parents because, to an undiscerning mind, what is familiar appears to be true. They are shown a way, and that way becomes the world they inherit. If another way seems strange, it is only because they were conditioned differently.

Now imagine I continue leading you through the forest, naming everything for you. Every tree. Every bird. Every breeze. You listen carefully. You memorize. You begin to recognize the world, but only through my words. Perhaps you even believe you are experiencing it, when in reality you are experiencing my interpretation of it.

Eventually, you may begin to believe that I possess some extraordinary knowledge—that I am a master of the earth, of the wind, of truth itself.

But I am not the master of rocks.

I am only the master of your conclusions.

I have told you what to think, what to feel, and what to believe, and you carry those beliefs into the world. You repeat them. You teach them. Others repeat them after you. Generation after generation, certainty is passed from one mind to another, while few stop to ask a simple question:

Have I ever truly known this for myself?

There is a quiet satisfaction in creating copies of ourselves. We praise agreement. We call it understanding. We look upon those who echo our words and think, Look what I have created.

But life has never created a copy.

There has never been another person who has lived your life, carried your memories, tasted your joys, endured your shame, or seen the world through the precise lens of your awareness. No one has ever breathed exactly as you breathe or stood exactly where you now stand.

Your individuality is not an accident. It is not something to overcome. When it is honored without pride, it becomes reverence. It becomes the recognition that life has never repeated itself, and never will.

Perhaps that is why the deepest truths cannot be handed from one person to another.

No one ever had to tell you what love was before you felt it.

No one had to explain beauty before it stopped you in your tracks.

No one had to convince you that silence exists before you entered it.

And perhaps no one has ever truly been able to tell you what God is.

Because before anyone named God for you, before anyone taught you a doctrine, before your first memory, before your first breath, there was already something within you that knew.

It has never left you.

It is what longs whenever you seek.

It is what recognizes truth before words can explain it.

It has been listening all along.

It is the God so many speak about—

not something another person can ever give you,

but something you remember.