I suppose that self discovery begins by looking out, looking up. Only then, perhaps, can I look in and begin to understand my motives, my knee jerk reactions to life's little curve balls, my ability--or inability--to shake things off and get up when some crazy circumstance knocks me on my ass. But where out? Where up?

Artifacts of my family history lie scattered across my bed, spill over the edge onto the floor. Letters and diaries. Land deeds. Cemetery records and headstone rubbings. Newspaper clippings. Drafts of family trees scratched onto parchment with fine-point calligraphy nibs. Dog-eared photographs and VHS tapes from which faces smile out at me with teeth and eyes I recognize from my bathroom mirror. This is looking out, looking away from myself to understand how I came to be this very personality in this very body.

But looking out, farther out, includes the phenomenon of the vision quest. Here, I visit cemeteries, old houses, strip-mall parking lots that used to be an ancestor's wheat fields. I stand on pseudo-sacred plots of space and wait for some diaphanous energy to rise up through the soles of my feet and strike me down, bring me to tears, and paint vivid, omniscient pictures behind closed eyelids. Yes, the vision quest is a physical looking out, but one too elusive to lead me down any real, substantive path toward self discovery.

So I look up.

I was raised in a Christian home. I was sent to a Christian school. I went to Sunday School and learned the words to the songs, the parables, the beatitudes, the ten commandments. I learned patience by sitting through long sermons, during which I was not allowed to wiggle or sleep. And through all this, I was taught to look up for salvation, forgiveness, strength, peace, love, nourishment. God was the answer.

As a young child, my grasp on the directives passed down to me by the church was limited to my ability to recite from memory certain passages from the Bible; if I could recite perfectly, I was a Christian. I was saved. I was going to Heaven. And Jesus loved me no matter what. That was all well and good, but there were things I didn't understand, and I was only allowed to ask certain questions.

My first question, ironically, had to do with the language of the church. The phrase engraved across the great wooden alter at the front of our church read, "THIS DO IN REMEMBERANCE OF ME." THIS DO. THIS DO. Shouldn't it be DO THIS? It was all wrong. Someone had made a terrible mistake. Hadn't anyone noticed? Should I say something?

My habit of questioning the church, religion, doctrine, God Himself, this habit has become a talent I continue to develop, mostly because I have no choice. Little questions pop up all the time--at restaurants, at movies, in dreams--and nothing has an answer. Who am I? Why am I here? What divine wisdom have I been missing in my twenty-seven years on this planet?

So to look inside myself and try to understand the mysteries that simmer beneath my skin. I look out at the things close to me: my family, my history, my artifacts. And I look up. And I feel dizzy, and sick, and thrilled, and ecstatic, and childlike, and stupid, and enlightened all at once. Reverse vertigo. The same feeling I had the day I stood beneath the watertower and looked up.

Water, the archetype of purity, renewal, power, and strength. And tower, a place from which to look out from horizon to horizon, a sentinel that guards a little piece of sacred space. A watertower stands over Madelia, my Wonderland. And somewhere in the back of my mind, a child sits in the back seat of a car. She sits between her brother and sister; she sits on her knees so she can see up ahead through the windshield. She catches the first sliver glimpse of the watertower, and she is filled with anticipation. She is Alice falling down the rabbit hole. She is me. And she chants in a haunting echo, "I see the watertower! I see the watertower!"