The time will come when, with elation

You will greet yourself arriving 

At your own door, in your own mirror,

And each will smile at the others welcome,

And say, sit here. 

Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was yourself.

By Derek Walcott

     My friend Sally sent me this poem several month ago.  I take it as a message to make peace with oneself. Before we forgive others, we must forgive ourselves.  

     Another version of this theme is found in a jingle my mom taught to me when I left her house one day.  It goes like this:

I’ve gone out to look for myself, if I should return before I get back, keep me here.

     And finally a quote by David Bowie:

Aging is an extraordinary process whereby

You become the person you always should have been.”

I like David’s quote because we race through life trying to figure out what we want to be and do when we grow up, only to realize that our true selves were within us all the time.  I like to relive the idyllic aspects of my childhood and re-create them whenever I can.  Things like chasing butterflies and collecting crickets for that much loathed science project you had to do at the beginning of every school year.  I hated jabbing those pins into the thoraces of those poor insects and sticking them on cardboard poster board.  Egads! then you had to label them.  I went back to chasing butterflies instead and looking at wildflowers in the field, and consequently failed the school assignment.   I’m happy I failed, because to this day I can come back to myself and the child that lives within, and say:

This is who I was, this is who I am. GRB