becoming conscious

development and us

we come out of the great ocean,

slowly awakening from the womb,

only becoming conscious when we learn from touch,

particularly the touch of a parent,

we connect with another, 

we ground ourselves in relationship,

later we learn that others have a sound

unique to them, a name,

and suddenly all the gestalt around us

differentiates into things, things with names:

sounds, words that give us a handle

with which our tongues, like the opposable thumb,

can grasp that outside us,

manipulate it,

make sense of it all,

shapes on the page morph into words,

words morph into stories,

and we learn the stories within which we are characters,

later, we learn to write,

to string shapes into meaning,

and we no longer are just immersed in that primordial ocean,

we climb above, we stand apart,

we mirror what we have heard, read, thought,

then the mirror transforms into a creator of new meaning,

and reflects back into the self

until we create meaning as new as we can make real.

thanks to

Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf

for much of the thoughts above.

by Henry H. Walker

February 12, ‘16