She

Rationale: inner otherness is your first encounter with some aspect of the self that is impersonal, that is, in a way, collective and immortal. What would that look like for me? It would be a mishmash of opposites. That is, her

Someone once called me an old soul. Let me explain what that doesn't mean. It doesn't imply wisdom or experience. All it implies is a certain weariness, and weariness is no stranger to me. Neither are black moods, fears of death, the rattles of the cage, though I dance my chains like the sea (a little idiosyncratic Dylan Thomas there). So much for the pseudo-self-help astrology-grade insight.

So why this little girl? Look at her again. She is striking. She is perceptive. She is already accusing you, having seen that which you are hiding. She does not take you at face value, her default take being to assume the average knot of ill-understood drives lying somewhere behind the mask you show to the world. You can just tell she has an older brother--a mentally unstable older brother. Perhaps he is hyperactive, or has issues with rage, or drinks heavily, or goes out onto the streets to steal and loot to feed other addictions. She is the only one that can melt him, but sometimes her accusing eyes only worsen his rage. Her parents are absent, if not physically, then mentally. Fixated on jobs, or cleanliness, or travelling as a pathological form of futile escape, or obsessed with "finding themselves"--and reading to that end all the Freud, the Jung and Adler, all the Maslow, Deepak Chopra, Dalai Lama, books of Zen koans, books on flower arranging, Tai Chi, physiological psychology, books on faith healing and out-of-body experiences, UFOs, Norse Mythology, evolutionary theory. I bet she already knows how to cook, and all her early childish blunders (the "darndest things") have already tightened up. The fount of words is still there, but it is a fount of insight, mostly kept to the self, transferred to a totemic toy (a truck, a teddy bear, a blanket, a mirror), or played out with an imaginery friend. She stares at animals and backs away from them--she'll feel no communion. And how can she? She is terrifying. Also seductive (not in that way--but my words stand as they are). She embodies what I m not and aspire to, but lazily. Wisdom, not just dusty oldness. Imaginativeness, not fact-memory. Actual cretion of new myths instead of waiting for one to drop into your lap. I'll bet she dreams such vivid dreams, and what comes to her if she pierces through the vague swirl of the day's events. If she pulls back her brother stumbling in high/angry/retarded, if she climbs over the molasses waterfall of here parents talking politics/religion/science over the dinner table, she will find her own inner otherness. Is that me?

Consider: "If there is anything we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves."