It was June, 1996, when I was asked to introduce myself to group of strangers high atop a snow-packed mountaintop on a National Outdoor Leadership School course in the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest located in Washington, USA. We had all met earlier that day, packed our backpacks, and traversed our way up into the mountains from our drop-off point.
Asked to consider ourselves as more than our roles and identities, I pondered. Who am I? Why am I here?
I gazed out over the glistening white mountaintops and the 3-dimensional showcase of sparkling stars. In a flash of an intuitive realization, everything made sense. I was everything I was looking at, past and present, in one whole auspicious experience of living, consciously aware, intuitively connected, and inherently relaxed and free. I was here to be guided by a power I hadn’t previously recognized.
I dreamed that night of the dawn of a new beginning which would begin upon sunrise and lead the direction of my expedition, and my life, moving forward. As I recall, the dream was something like this…
An elder sat quietly beside the fire and watched the first light touch the trees.
For a long while, he said nothing.
Then he looked at me.
“You ask me who you are.
But perhaps,” he said softly, “you are asking the wrong question.”
He placed another piece of wood upon the fire.
“Before you were a name, you were a breath.
Before you were a story, you were a possibility.
Before you came into this world, the morning was already waiting for you.”
He looked toward the eastern sky.
“Do you hear the birds?”
I nodded.
“They do not ask who they are. They simply become what they were given to become.
The river does not ask if it has found its purpose.
The tree does not wonder whether it is enough.
It stands.
It reaches.
It gives.
And when its time comes, it returns itself to the earth.”
The elder turned back toward me.
“You are like that.
You are not here merely to find yourself.
You are here to remember yourself.
Remember that you belong to something older than your own story.
Remember the people whose lives made your life possible.
Remember the wounds you have carried, but do not make a home inside them.
Remember the loves that changed you.
Remember the moments when something within you became very still—and you knew, without knowing how you knew, that you were standing near the truth.”
The fire cracked.
“The purpose of your life,” he continued, “may not be something waiting somewhere ahead of you.
Perhaps it is something that has been quietly calling you from within all along.
Listen.
Not with your ears.
Listen with the place beneath your thoughts.
There is a voice there that does not shout.
It waits.”
The sun finally appeared above the horizon.
The elder smiled.
“You ask me, ‘Who am I?’
Look at the sunrise.
You are the one who is here to witness it.
You are the one who has been given another morning.
You are the one who can still choose what to do with the light.”
He leaned toward the fire.
“And someday, when your journey is nearly complete, perhaps you will understand:
You were never meant to possess the answer to Who am I?
You were meant to live the answer.
So walk gently.
Give more than you take.
Leave something beautiful behind you.
And when the Great Mystery calls you home,
may the people who come after you say—
‘Because this person walked upon the Earth,
there was a little more light in the world.’”