Guest Post by Dennis Ernst
I recently made a visit to the Another Face of Mexico Mask Museum in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. It was a huge, private collection of over 500 masks, from the 35 historic cultures in Mexico and Central America. The masks were used in rituals, dances, cultural celebrations, and were part of the collective identity.
The concept of the masks haunted me. The need to become something other that what we are, and imbue them with special powers, to feel like they were something greater than their ordinary life. This is a story of creating an identity and wearing it like a mask.
Your Mask Museum
You do not remember the first mask. It arrived before you had words, slipped on at the moment of your arrival, already crafted from family, race, culture, sex and it became how the world recognized you.
So you wore it. And then soon, gathered more.
The victim one, the perpetrator one, the rescuer one. The one who had the most, the one that had the least, the warrior, the hero and the enemy. Masks borrowed from old pain and fame, masks inherited before you could refuse them, masks so familiar, you stopped feeling the weight.
And for each mask, a story.
This is what happened to me. This is what it made me. This is why I am the way I am.
The stories calcify around the masks like shell around stone, until you cannot tell where the mask ends and where you begin.
But the past is not the only mask.
There is the one you wear right now — the self you are carefully constructing, curating, presenting.
The version of you that appears in rooms, that speaks in meetings, that loves in the particular way you have decided love looks on you.
And for this mask, too, a story.
This is who I am now. This is what I have become. This is the self I have worked so hard to build.
And beyond that, — the most seductive mask of all — the one you haven’t grown into yet. The future self, luminous and unearned, waiting just past the next achievement, the next transformation, the next arrival.
The story you tell about that one is the most beautiful of all — and the most dangerous.
When I become that, I will finally be enough.
Three masks, then. The one called past. The one called present. The one called future.
And a story for each — told so often, believed so completely, that the telling becomes a kind of living novel considered to be a biography.
Except it isn’t.
Then one day, a crack.
Not always dramatic. Sometimes just a silence where the story used to be. An arrival that feels nothing like what you were promised. A mirror that shows you, suddenly, something fitted over your face.
And you look. Really look.
You see them all — the ancient ones placed on you before you could refuse them, the careful ones you built from wounds that learned to perform, the present ones you polish daily, the future ones you dream toward like a horizon that keeps moving.
And beneath the masks, the stories.
Heard so many times they feel like memory. Repeated so often they feel like truth.
But a story is not a life. A mask is not a face.
So set them down.
Not forever. Just for the length of one breath.
Feel what remains in that stillness — not emptiness, not absence, but a presence.
Quiet. Unhurried. Older than any story you have ever told about yourself. No past required to confirm it. No future needed to complete it. No story necessary to sustain it.
It was here before the first mask. It watched every version of you come and go. It never needed any of them to know that it exists.
This is not philosophy.
This is what moves your heart without your instruction; what breathes you while you are busy being someone.
This presence — when it stirs, when it reaches outward into love, into creation, into one unguarded moment with another human being — does not merely witness life.
It becomes it.
The story was never the source. The mask was never the face. The becoming was never the being.
You were never inside the mask.
The mask was inside you.
And beneath them all — past, present, and the imagined future — beneath the whole long accumulated story of becoming someone — this remains: eternal, unchanged, oneness, beingness, the only thing that was ever truly you — the being itself, living through you, already whole, already here, Already you.
You are life.
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Dennis Ernst is a retired Professional Land Surveyor who now devotes his time to sharing the natural beauty he finds on his many treks through photography, blogs, and poetry. Please visit his website, Dennis Ernst Photography, for a glimpse into his fascinating world.
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