I would like to start tonight's talk with a story, and the story's title is Dinosaur,

written by Bruce Holland Rodgers. When he was very young, he waved his arm, snapped his massive jaws,

and trumped around the house so the dishes trembled in the China cabinet. Oh, for goodness sake,

his mother said, you are not a dinosaur. You're a human being. Since he was not a dinosaur,

he thought, for a time he might be a pirate. Seriously, his father said to him after school one day,

what do you want to be? A fireman, maybe? Or a policeman? Or a soldier? Some kind of hero?

But in high school, they gave him tests and told him he was good with numbers. Perhaps he'd want

to be a math teacher. That was respectable. Our tax accountant. He could make a lot of money doing

that. It seemed a good idea to make money, what with falling in love and thinking about raising

a family, so he became a tax accountant, even though he sometimes regretted it because it made him feel,

well, small. And he felt even smaller when he was no longer a tax accountant, but a retired tax

accountant. Still worse, a retired tax accountant who forgot things. He forgot to take the garbs to

the curb, to take his pill, to turn his hearing aid on. Every day it seemed he forgot more things,

important things like where his children lived and which of them were married or divorced.

Then one day, when he was out for a walk by the lake, he forgot what his mother had told him.

He forgot that he was not a dinosaur. He stood blinking his dinosaur eyes in the bright sunlight,

feeling its familiar warmth on his dinosaur skin, watching drag and flies,

flitting among the horse tails at the water's edge.

So I really love this story of forgetting our learned identity,

that we become free when we step out of this notion of who we think we are, supposed to be,

to really and have it a kind of creativity. We all live with layers of who we've been told we are,

who we should be or who we shouldn't be. We're all living with that. And one way of understanding

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