The Apples of the Hesperides...

...get in touch

With what? Oneself? Many go to the desert or to the therapist with just such a quarry in mind. But "myself" turns out either to be eluding me, like the egg in Alice in Wonderland, or to be a less satisfactory prize than I had supposed, our own epoch having drilled into me the notion that the question "who am I" is the Golden Key.

Not so , says history. Not so say the sages. Not so, say all the myths. The quest for yourself leads to solitude. It is a vortex from which escape is almost impossible. On and on you will go, from the therapist to the medicine man, rifling into your viscera, swallowing the pills, identifying the syndromes and neuroses, discovering how you have been victimized and abused, and embarking on ever fresh techniques. But, like Palomides chasing his chimera, never apprehending your quarry...

Alas! you mortal soul, the voice of the bard cries out to us. It is not yourself but rather the Apples of the Hesperides that you seek. It is Arcadia, say the poets. It is the Garden of Adonis. It is the Well at the World's End. It is the Grail.

No no, whisper the therapists: those are illusions wrought from the fever of your own estrangement from yourself.

Wrong, say the bards and the prophets, the sages and the seers: you lost yourself because you had, long before, lost the god.

Who is he?

The answer, from far beyond the myths and oracles and pantheons, comes to us from the burning bush: I Am That I Am....