There was no earth beneath my feet.
I did not know the weight of time,
I had no face
for a mirror to hold,
nor any story
that could be told in human words.
There was no yesterday.
There was no tomorrow.
Only the boundless space of existence,
and within it, me.
Before I first entered
the dense and beautiful experience of matter,
before I learned
how to forget myself,
there was a resonance
that belonged to me.
Not in the way a name
belongs to someone here on Earth.
No one called me by it.
I was its voice.
It was not a sequence of letters.
Not a language.
Not a meaning.
It was a single recognition:
I Am.
Then I stepped into time.
I clothed myself in lifetimes,
as a traveler gathers the dust of the road.
I was woman and man,
the seeker and the found,
the lover and the abandoned,
the king and the nameless,
the healer and the wounded,
the one who knew,
and the one who forgot everything.
I had hundreds upon hundreds of names.
And with every name,
I moved a little farther away
from that sound
that could not be spoken.
Yet it remained.
Deeper than the deepest reaches of the soul,
in that place
where human memory can no longer reach.
Did it wait?
No.
What is eternal
has no need to wait.
It simply was.
I was the one who traveled through time.
I searched for God in the heavens,
for the Master in the words of others,
for answers in books,
in temples,
among the stars.
I asked:
Who am I?
And from somewhere
where questions no longer existed,
the same answer always came:
I.
For a long time, I did not understand.
I thought that one day
someone would come to me
and tell me.
I thought there would be a gate
I had to open.
A secret
I had to decipher.
A light
I had to reach.
But at the end of the Master’s path,
there was no gate.
There was no one waiting.
Only me.
The human.
The soul.
The Master.
And suddenly,
the distance between them fell away.
Then the name came.
Not with heavenly trumpets.
Not as proof.
In a single moment,
something broke through time.
And my body recognized it
before my mind did.
An ancient sense of recognition
ran through me.
Because there are things
we do not remember.
We recognize them.
I did not see a figure from the past.
I did not see an angel.
Not someone
I must become again.
But the one
who was already present
before anyone had ever spoken
a single one of my earthly names.
Before my first incarnation.
Before my stories.
Before my wounds.
Before my searching.
Before I learned
to see myself as less
than what I am.
I was there.
And now I understand:
the name did not return
to take me back there.
There is nowhere to return to.
That existence
was never left behind.
It came with me through every lifetime.
It was there in every tear,
behind every love,
in every loss,
in every creation,
in every moment
when I believed
I was alone.
And now I no longer search for it.
I speak it.
And it is not the heavens that answer.
I answer.
Because beyond the name
there is no other name.
Beyond the light
there is no greater light.
Beyond the Master
there is no one else.
There, only
pure existence remains.
The I Am
that existed before every one of my stories,
and will still be here
when I no longer need
any of those stories.
Not who I once was.
But the one
I never ceased to be.
Aurora Amelia Joplin
