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The Prince's Dream Once upon a time there was a young prince who imagined great ugliness all around him. It hummed behind the sound of cars rushing by, lurked invisibly amidst the limitless void of blue overhead and gathered on window sills and in the corners of his house. As he grew into a young man this pervasive sense of misalignment trapped the small boy inside a maturing body where fear and insecurity constantly wrestled with hope and enthusiasm. Awakening with no memory of the night's dreams, each morning glistened with the edge of an unspoken terror. In his quest to find himself in a dislocated world the young prince led armies of thoughts in bold crusades against the blind authority of parents, the imprisoning discipline of conventional education, the hypocrisy of the workplace and dishonesty in personal relationships. Years past leaving behind pillaged friendships, skeptical teachers, angry parents and resentful employers. Pausing in a small garret in the bohemian section of the world's largest city the prince reflected on the violent conversation a battalion of his finest thought-troops had just completed with his most recent concubine (there had been a long series of two year relationships with women he consciously told himself were his eternal soulmates). Tense and soon yelling at the top of his voice the prince had laid out the same arguments and criticisms almost word for word that had been heaped upon the previous concubines. Now these were all totally different types of women from diverse backgrounds and cultures yet, the final outcome of the relationship was always the same. The prince suddenly saw this pattern, like a receding echo, in all his confrontations with authority and personal commitment. Returning to the place from which he had started the prince realized, slowly and with great difficulty, he was proceeding in circles. His mental generals rose in unison to refute this possibility and produced their carefully assembled compassess, demanding the prince consider once again their ancient logic. A suspicion began to grow in the prince that his questing in the outer world was somehow an external manifestation of an inner journey, and the ugliness and imbalance he detected outside of himself was a map tracing the contours of his own inner deficiencies. This suggestion caused such a commotion among his generals that for many hours no discourse was possible at all. Finally the prince dismissed these powers of reason on whom he had fully relied for so long and lay down to sleep. When he awoke he was at the end of a long dream which he could not fully recall; there were familiar people with faces he did not know and enclosed spaces from which he was trying to escape and rain and thunder and confusion - at the moment before he awoke he was standing in a doorway with the wind whipping the rain against his face, around him stretched the labyrinthine canyons of a city and huddled in a doorway across the street was a beggar. We are all princes (or princesses) waiting for our kingdom to come. And the end of all our searching will be to return to the place from which we started and know it for the first time. I am that prince who does not recognize the beggar in the mirror of the world.