Just add colors

It's funny where the self turns up. For what it's worth, I feel more myself in an old pair of Vans, jeans and an Element t-shirt, my tongue sharply burnt and bitter from an Americano, reclined in a coffee shop's straight-back chair with a thin, dog-eared book on the table, scrawling the other half of some half-thought truth in a notebook.

But what is the self anyway, but a kaleidoscope of experiences leading up to a given point in time and place and including the desires and experiences you are hoping to have, the ones you want to be able to look back on as "yours," all swirling colors through a cylinder.

At the same time, some self had better pay the electric bill and cut the grass.

Whatever we make self out to be, those times when we don't notice it, when we are opening ourselves wide to let more in, when we expand ourselves--through love, through God, through nature, through our children, through art, through music, through teaching--those are the times when our selves smile and the kaleidoscope of the self adds more colors.