Bird in a cage

There are times in my life when I am happy. I mean really happy and content to be David. And then I think to myself am I everything I lead myself to believe I am? Do I really need to attach so many labels to myself? These labels creating the person David.

My name is an excellent example. Am I really called David? The name was given to me at birth by my parents and my brothers instilled the identity through my youth. And then I was educated. I was taught that I had to become someone, no one ever taught me that I was already enough, perfect when I was born, just by living and breathing on this miracle called Planet Earth.

What I have found is that for my entire life I have been building stories based on attachments that defend my right to be David. And to defend David was never enough, because I was never enough and I found myself seeking to improve David.

And now there is freedom.

I am a bird in a cage, and the door to the cage has been opened, I am free to fly, fly to freedom. Yet I am scared to make the leap due to my fear of flying. Will I fly or will I plumet to my death?

I am finding that I can fly at the same time as plumetting to my death, and I am realising that I was never David in the first place. So if I am not David who am I? Does it matter? I guess not!

This moment is the only moment that matters flying or not flying, awake or asleep like 99% of the world's population, who wants to wake up, who wants to fly? It is painful to wake from the dream, it hurts when you learn to fly, to realise the stories instilled in me as a boy were all lies, to realise that the reflection in the mirror has got nothing to do with who I thought I was.

And then there is this! This is the only concious contact I have with a higher power, this higher power being life itself, and for so many years I used a multiple of strategies to stop living. It is only now that I have started to wake from the dream.

Buddha spoke of the end of suffering. Anthony de Mello spoke of letting go of attachements, Jesus preached about finding heaven on earth, and the 12 Steps is deconditioning 37 years of conditioned education, and finally one day at a time I am finding freedom in the death of David.

As I taste freedom I like it, I don't want more because I can only have more of something that I do not already have in abundance, and life is not in short supply, life is everywhere I look. On every street corner, in every bar, every brothel I have ever fequented, life is in the church, the local school, it is hidden within the gossip colums of the local rags. Life is on the roads and life rains down on me during Winter.

I cannot escape life and why would I? I am life and so are You.