Vachon Imagined

One of the questions I have circled for years is: How do I know who God is?

Go big or go home, I suppose. Start with the biggest questions and work backwards.

How do I know who God is?
How do I know who my ancestors are?
And then, perhaps most inconveniently, how do I know who I am?

I think these are questions we all ask ourselves, especially when life becomes difficult enough to make us wonder whether we want to keep participating in it—as if we can ever escape it.

War. Famine. Suicide. Poverty. Or just nagging kids who will not leave you alone.

Life gets hard.

And then, somehow, it is also incredibly fun, joyous, celebratory, and amazingly sexual. And by sexual, I mean both sex itself—ooh la la—and the sexuality of feeling itself. Desire. Such a clean word, and yet one I think we judge differently depending on who is speaking it.

When I AM, these questions keep coming back to the same place.

I don’t know if I am feeling something as much as I am simply knowing something.

It is a kind of knowing that takes all my questions and brings them into one space without dividing them.

And I think that may be what human beings are ultimately looking for.

Not another answer.

A place where the questions no longer need to be separate.

Who was I before the world told me who I was—and then I believed it?

Am I all of those things for the sake of experience?

Sure. Relatively speaking, we can agree to that.

But intelligence doesn’t agree.

Intelligence simply is.

Anything that attempts to define it, divide it, contain it, or explain it ultimately fails because the act of defining it creates a boundary around something that, by its nature, has no boundary.

So perhaps the best we can do is be its presence.

However that presence is expressed.

And then know that presence in everything.

It is in everyone.

And if you truly knew this, how would you ultimately talk to them? How would you treat them? How would you view them?

Would you still be so certain that you knew who they were?

Or would you begin to understand that whatever you see in them—their failures, their beauty, their cruelty, their kindness, their confusion, their brilliance—is only the expression of something much larger than the thing you have named?

Who would we be then?

I don’t know.

None of us does.

No matter how intellectual, spiritual, educated, disciplined, or self-aware we become, none of us can prove it. Not even the most descriptive poet can prove it. Not even the most enlightened person can hand us the evidence and say, Here. This is what you are.

So we move in it.

We live in it.

We experience it.

Somewhere beneath all our attempts to explain ourselves, we know that we have given permission to this knowing—not by proving it, but by being it.

And that is both the beginning and the ending of knowing who we are and proving it to anyone else.