A Return to Eden

When does consciousness begin, this knowing

who and what we are, the why even of self-awareness?

 

With egg and sperm and cells dividing, becoming us,

our limbs and organs, heart and brain forming in a womb,

connected, a new life’s beginning, growing

into ourselves, shaped and molded, scolded,

and there in that warm sea floating, discovering fingers

and toes, a face with nose and mouth and eyes that couldn’t see,

inhabiting a place, a space of muffled noise and light?

 

Or at our birth, expelled on a tidal wave into light, blinded,

our lungs flooded with air and breath, the screams we made,

first sounds, carried into a cold world, disconnected,

on our own to figure things out, inside a body, a physical form

we cannot control, dependent on others, cuddling us,

coddling us, cudgeling our brains, searching.

 

Or is this familiarity, this knowing, this recognition

already there, a consciousness long before conception,

the who, the what, the why of being, and born, rememb’ing it,

or giving in, giving up what we knew before this new experience,

this inherent awareness, forgetting it all, perhaps, in becoming

what they would have us become, or do, or be, losing ourselves?

 

And what happens when that consciousness, innate, doesn’t match

the reality given us, trying to survive, to please someone, to exist

in that which we are not, expectations we cannot meet, not our own,

but thrust upon us in behaviors and colors and attitudes,

platitudes, our very being called out, gender itself, why we cannot

cry, cannot feel openly what we feel, feminine or masculine but by body

shape and size, or is it, rather, by a consciousness, a knowing who and what

we were long before we were born, our dreams and visions, consciously

aware that we are here now, have existence, as well an understanding

of somewhere else, beyond time and place, before the egg and sperm

and cells dividing, before life begins, a golden sunlight without form

forming us for no other reason than to become us, a body to house us,

to live in, purposeful, perchance to advance this world, this humanity,

this life into which we have arrived, naked and blind and screaming,

to share the who and the what, the why, with skills and gifts and talents

beyond others’ expectations, conceiving, achieving perfection,

bringing together this inherent consciousness with the world

of now, a return to Eden from which we came, before creation.