Now I Become Myself

Now I become myself.
It’s taken time, many years and places.
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces.
May Sarton, “Now I Become Myself”1

As Parker Palmer writes in response to this poem in his book Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation,2 “What a long time it can take to become the person one has always been!”

Who have you become? Are you becoming? This is the ultimate adventure of discovery. On cool Saturday mornings before the heat of the day arises, a small group of us have been gathering on the back verandah of Adelaide House, an historical building in the center of the center – Todd Mall, Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Australia. With Palmer’s book as our guide, we’ve been crunching handfuls of homemade muesli and chewing on what the “many years and places” have taught us about who we are now and who we may yet become.

For the next five weeks, on Tuesday evenings Alice Springs time, we’ll open up the back verandah to you here on the headSpa blog. Grab your own snacks for now, muesli recipe to follow…

Palmer talks about looking for clues to our true self in our early dreams and aspirations. Try this: On a piece of paper or spreadsheet program, make columns for each decade (or half decade) of your life. Use the following questions to fill in the columns with clues.

1. What were you good at during this time?
2. What were you telling others you wanted to be and do?
3. Whom did you admire and want to be like?

Keep the nature of clues in mind as you sit with your columns: clues have to be decoded. There isn’t necessarily anything obvious about them. Dig around a little in the things you’ve written and work on deciphering them. What are the connections to what you’re doing now? Where is there paradox? Where is the connection direct? What appears to have been forgotten or left behind but is actually alive and well in the present moment?


1May Sarton, “Now I Become Myself” in Collected Poems 1930-1973 (New York: Norton, 1974)

2Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000) p. 9
Buy the book at www.amazon.com