An Evolutionary Song of Myself

This poem has been knocking on my door wanting to come out for some days now, so I had to let it out.

I've been thinking about the evolutionary process, the authentic self and the extraordinary impersonality of the whole thing - and how simultaneously our deepest humanity is found here.

 The theme of the Universe Project conference calls at the moment, ( BTW: join up and join in - it's free) is the authentic self, and somehow I've attempted to capture in a few words, the grandeur and deep time implications of what it all means.

An Evolutionary Song of Myself

With gratitude to part of myself: Walt Whitman

I am all that's come before

All 13.7 billion years of what has come before

Every minute of it.

To be the growing edge of this unthinkable continuum

now reaching into potentials uncharted

I am the growing result, the synthesis of all that has been.

I am the whole wave front of Life

All the experience, responses, reactions, understanding, advances, sorrows, joys, cul de sacs,

Everything that's come before,

It is my cells, my tissues, my physical form, coursing through my veins, my brain and mind

Can I be big enough to let in who I am?

Movement toward and reaction against, desire and fear, from my earliest stirrings as consciousness.

Unicellular organism becoming community of cells and organs

Emergence from the oceans

Unconscious habits still from the age of reptiles

The quickness of noticing movement, the colour vision from the birds

The socialness of flocks and herds,

The warmth and fur of mammals

The fear and desire for safety in the mouse's eye

The complex web of relationships of my primate relatives.

The struggle of hominoids ever questing forward.

The lust, aspirations, empathy, hatred, violence, curiosity, instinct

Language, communication, consciousness, development, all interwoven

To become the fabric of my view, my brain, my intelligence

When I speak, I speak for all that came before

Consciousness pressing onwards

All is in me and I am the accumulation, distillation,

This-point-in-time culmination of all that is before

though there is no end.

All the advances of humans, so hard won at great sacrifice are embodied in me

The recipient of all that came before.

All human history is in me in some form.

And then to become conscious of consciousness itself, only those few short thousand of years ago

What a tremendous step in my development!

The tribal, social, family, national, individual, all have become reflex structures in my consciousness

I am the mixture and synthesis of all the emotions, sensations,

 conscious, semi conscious or habitual, at multitudinous and varying levels of development in me

All is in me competing, clamouring and compelling for expression,

 all in the spectrum of my experience.

Including the most recent demand to be heard, of the voice

 who insistently claims to be an independent entity with his own separate life to live.

And I am awed and blessed to be able to know now that

- again as beneficiary of those pioneers who most recently came before -

 I am this Life Process.

Is my heart big enough to hold it all?

Who am I?

I am ‘that' - but ‘that' is the evolutionary process itself

And there's telos, directionality, behind the whole movement.

How can I say so?

Because I am keenly aware of it in my heart,

As after all, I am the process itself.

And I can choose what to express and where to direct the precious gift of conscious awareness

that is ever able to emerge, as the vessel and the perspective gradually expands.

Everything is there in this incredible unfolding from the beginning of creation.

But who I will be and how the process develops now depends on my conscious choices

The universal call of the creative impulse is to be more conscious, ever deeper,

 more transcendent and inclusive, more transcendent and exclusive.

I am all that's come before now launching out to be all that is to come.