I Realized - One

Something within me prompted me to recount for myself and for others how I have become the person that I am now. I realized that a series of realizations, a growing awareness, was the path that brought me here. I committed myself to documenting these and since I keep a journal and have done so for many years, this project was not so difficult as it had at first appeared. I intend to share these realizations with you. They comprise many pages and I will offer them one segment at a time. Here is the first such offering. These realizations came to me as I was a child and a young adult. By the age of 25, I had come to the realization which you will find at the end of this segment.

I realized that I kept falling in love with the world. I kept falling in love with feeling, with moments. I kept falling in love with the places where I experienced these feelings, lived these moments.

I realized that poetry could potentially express this love. I realized that some prose, a sort of poetic prose, could potentially express this love and so I began to explore words and the power of words to express this love for moments, this rapturous love for feeling states.

I realized that movement could express also, that joy could be expressed through movement, through dance, more easily and directly than through any words.

I realized that vocalizations of song and vocal harmonies could express so much. It didn’t matter what words were being sung - well, it did matter, but not nearly so much as people thought it did. And my love for words and the power of words and my love for the vocalization of song, the singing in the choir of over one hundred voices, came together and I began to recreate the words of the Anglican church services. I began to use their words differently and to change their words within my own consciousness.

I realized that I could not negotiate Christianity’s teachings and beliefs, that they were fundamentally opposed to my feeling and innate knowing about self and society and world. I realized that I would need to create another path to God for myself because I wanted to know God and to have God in my life, but not on Christianity's terms.