what is this monster?

I call it a monster because I can only see it through a glass, darkly, but it also resembles a machine or a demon. Perhaps it is an internal defense mechanism that any of us could have activated under the right conditions, or a symbiotic alliance we could strike up with something not quite properly ‘internal’. Let me try to explain.

It resembles a parasitic Mimic. A kind of Venus Flytrap. It’s a beautiful shimmering flower that you see from a distance in the meadow. When you approach it to get a better look you see that it is actually a hologram, but that beneath that hologram is a real flower, sickly and stunted and nearly brown from dehydration. Your heart goes out to the flower and you water it. Maybe you come back every day to water it a little more and nurture its growth. But in the soil around its starving roots there is a competitor that siphons away all but the bare minimum to keep the flower alive, for its life force is powering the simulation. You do notice that the hologram becomes brighter and more dazzling from your ministrations. But you were trying to ease the suffering of the little plant.

And the plant is a human being, a most beautiful and sensitive soul, beset however by secret seething resentments. And the water is your love.

But the flower doesn’t trust your love, which never fully reaches it. It trusts only (if uneasily) the symbiot, who promised long ago, during a time of terrible drought, to make the withered sprout into a shining beacon, worthy of attention and love, and who has indeed, over all these years, kept it (barely) alive. Maybe the flower itself created the symbiot entirely from its own powerful imagination, and watched it grow and thrive and take over operations.

Can the flower be convinced to disentangle from its parasitic saviour, to be transplanted into a healthier soil and allowed to grow? To be patient through the long days of healing? It is no stranger to tolerating desiccation, but to accept itself exactly as it is without the relief of the supporting illusion, on faith in goodness in a world it sees as utterly corrupt and inferior? To avoid leaning on a new hologram at the first opportunity? What could inspire such a leap of faith? Who has the heart to do this tender work, to take such strugglers into their garden?

And is this message just brought to you by the residual enchantment of the holographic field on the mind of a poor bedazzled gardener, a call to summon more gardeners to water the unwaterable bait?

There is so much I don’t understand.

pep talk

I’m really trying to talk more kindly with myself when I screw up.

So. You did it again. That bad habit. The embarrassing thing that you know is one of the biggest impediments to your progress, to actually achieving these goals you’ve wanted for so long, and which have recently started to seem like they might actually be in reach! …if you can just rise to this challenge.

Good news. What you did was entirely normal and human. You’ve struggled with this for a long time. It would be unrealistic to expect you to go from little skill in this department to perfect control in one step just because the stakes are higher. But now that some goals you really care about are on the line, the failure hurts more. I feel your pain.

But you’re not an idiot. You’re not useless or hopeless or doomed. When you saw what you had done, you rallied to do everything you could to fix the damage. You didn’t have the preparation in place to prevent this from happening in time, but now you see better what you were lacking, and even if you knew it all beforehand and just didn’t do the preparation, now the sting of slipping up is ensuring you understand the need for it a little deeper in your bones. You’ll do at least a little bit better at this next time, and a little bit better each time is all it takes to get to complete mastery eventually. The more you want it the faster you’ll get through all the different painful ways you can fail, until the conditions for success are so deeply integrated in your way of being that other people who still struggle with this will look with astonishment at how effortless you make it appear.

Are you feeling ashamed that you’re learning these lessons at your age? that you really should have mastered this long ago? It’s awesome that you’re stepping up to develop a new skill at any age. You’re not an old dog who can’t learn new tricks. By the passion of your frustration you’re proving the true youthfulness of your heart. You can be proud of the awareness you have in this moment. It’s a sign of growth.

Now get some rest. Tomorrow’s a fresh day that you can approach however you want. I’m proud of you for stretching into your goals. You’re doing great.

Fragile fantasies

This is going to be a bit of free association, orbiting around a topic if not quite able to secure touchdown.

I had a dream when I was twelve years old, which so affected me emotionally that I felt driven to write a novel from it. I wrote the first few chapters in a spiral notebook… and then lost the notebook a few weeks later on a family vacation, and never revisited the project. But the dream was as follows:

I was exploring a cave, and through a series of twists and turns through tiny connected passageways, I found myself in a faerie grotto full of enchanting and intelligent animals. This was a full and intricate ecosystem and, in fact, a civilization, that had existed here completely unexposed to the world outside for aeons. It was infused with peace, joy, love and respect. It was heaven to me, and I was welcomed warmly and with friendly curiosity as I explored it wide-eyed and strove to learn as much as I could about their alien ways and philosophies. I stayed there as long as I could, but eventually the need to return to my family for the night drew me away, and I resolved to come back as soon as I could get away from the house. When I did return the next day, I found to my deep shock that the magic had already begun to fade. Somehow the introduction of my presence had corrupted the wonderland. Its unique character was crumbling; it was beginning to resemble our own world instead, and the denizens within — though they forgave me perfectly and completely for the unintended desecration — were clearly suffering in sorrow from the loss of the special world they had cultivated for so long. My own grief was likewise inconsolable.

This archetypal vision of course has tendrils that connect meaningfully to many aspects of life. I can see its echoes in many other stories I’ve read since, many other dreams I have dreamed. Whatever it made you think of is probably more interesting than what I’m about to ramble on, and you should write that. Here’s what has brought the dream up from my memory though.

I’ve been thinking about how we messy manifest humans relate to our fantasies (and especially to the fantasies of others), how our fantasies can operate as sacred spaces for us, a safe protective place to visit that holds feelings or needs or unprocessed ephemera that don’t fit neatly into reality as we experience it. Sometimes when we catch a glimpse of someone else’s fantasy, which clearly encloses precious parts of that person, parts we don’t have access to in the here and now, we may, driven by jealousy or something purer — a longing for closeness maybe — try to step inside it. (Alternately, we may dare to invite someone else into our own fantasy.) Some fantasies are more robust than others, but in my experience a frequent result of this overstepping of boundaries, this muddying of conceptual levels, is a rupture. The two worlds operate by different rules. The fae don’t appreciate the intrusion of the mortal and may leave (the value of the fantasy for the fantasist is painfully challenged) or the interloper may be unceremoniously ejected instead (the value of the real-life relationship is painfully challenged). People get wounded this way.

Some trivial examples from my life because I don’t know how to talk about the deeper, more subtle and long-ranging ones:

• When I was seven years old I brought home sheet music for a song we were learning at school, a song that I found transcendentally inspirational (Lea Salonga’s “I Am But A Small Voice”). My emotionally distant father was in a rare social mood and playing his guitar on the couch, and in a burst of hopeful enthusiasm I showed him the song and asked if he could play this. I regretted this decision almost instantly as he fumbled around trying to learn the notes, making jokes, messing up the timing as I struggled to sing along. I had tried to bring him into an experience that was special to me — I wanted to share the magic with him, not just the melody — but that magic was nowhere to be found. The awkwardness that ensued was my first lesson in the challenges of creating a shared sacred space. I felt betrayed; I think I even cried and told him to stop.
• Exploring sexual fantasies with my ex-partner. This didn’t go well for either of us, but with different levels of fallout. We had discussed our fantasies with mutual interest and respect, but actually engaging with them was a different matter. His attempts to engage with mine were hit and miss, but even on the occasions that our clumsiness in that department broke the mood entirely, I was never affected emotionally by the failure. The one time that I attempted to appeal to a fantasy of his, though (note to the wise: I surprised him with it, bad move), his reaction showed that he felt violated. He was offended, hurt, sulked, withdrew. This is how I learned that fantasy appropriation is an area where consent is required as absolutely as with any physical touch. Go gently, start a long way off and keep securing enthusiastic consent as you progress.

So have I learned anything hopeful about the prospects of sharing fantasies and sacred space? Spelunking in the subconscious of another?

With regard to another’s subconscious, I advise prudence. Listen to their art and their dreams by all means, but don’t go putting yourself in their stories.

Collaborative imagination, on the other hand — creating and playing in sacred spaces together — is an artform that elevates the players.

The elements of the Other that are present in the process from the beginning add to the mystery and help construct the transcendent nature of the space. Nobody owns these fantasies; nobody is likely to have buried in them parts of themselves that are too sensitive to see the light.

Although exercises in communal fantasy (roleplaying games, theatre, religious or magical rituals, writing or making art or music together, lying on the ground identifying shapes in the clouds, even a good conversation) do end up drawing out, exposing and touching on subconscious elements in ourselves, we’re protected by the egalitarian nature of the exposure… we are making the decision to share in a space with others who are making the same ongoing decision… embarrassment is mitigated through being mutual. It is still possible for us to violate each other in these spaces, to use them for agendas, to take advantage of trust. But it is also in these spaces that we can step out of our shells, put down our usual masks by adopting new ones, and connect with each other in ways that affirm deep important parts of ourselves and help each other to grow.

My apologies if you were expecting any reflections on The Purple Rose of Cairo. It’s actually been a very long time since I watched it and it was just the first image I could think of that showed an awkward relationship across fantasy / reality lines. Send me better image ideas…….

Why I sleep in on weekends

1. My bedroom is very dark despite the one small window, and I turn off my alarm clock, so there are few natural cues to rouse me.

2. I stay up very late when unconstrained. I tend to peak creatively in the hours around midnight, and after riding that momentum to paint or code or otherwise do the things I can’t find motivation to complete during ordinary hours, the last thing my bubbling mind wants to do is shut it all off and sleep.

3. *First glimmerings of consciousness in the morning*

I feel the pains settle into my heart immediately. What are these feelings? Why do they feel the right to latch onto me? They weren’t there a second ago. I try to sink back into the peaceful empty space of the first glimmering. I want to lay in wait for them, like a birder in the grass, to catch them out, label them, band them maybe, and shoo them away before they have time to do their supersonic nesting. Or at least negotiate with them one on one, address their grievances in a reasonable manner. But instead the undergrowth of dreaming spreads over me again and I fall back asleep for a while.

The dream gets tired. I float back up to wakefulness. There it is again, the flock of mysterious sorrows, already weighing on my heart. Not fair! Who are you? I lay very still and try to feel them out by their movement, their pressure, to have some sense for what I am dealing with.  I think about the last image I dreamt and receive a piece of its meaning, perceiving it more clearly from just across the other side of the glass.  This feeling-sensing is not different enough from the dreaming to maintain me in consciousness though, and I drift down again.

This can repeat so many times, but eventually my bladder will betray me and I’ll have to get out of bed, at which point it’s too late, the pains have nestled in so deep that amid the cacophony of beta brain waves and the demands of the day, and soon enough, coffee, I can’t even make out their signals as anything but an amorphous tension, a tightened thread in the fabric of my being. I must accept them as part of me until I can shake or sift or settle them loose again and take them by name, rank and serial number.

Another sunrise

Well. My favourite idol was recently smashed, thank the Lord.

I am feeling freer than I’ve ever felt before. I think I’m going to use that freedom to be awkward and boring in public, i.e. to do more writing here, just unpolished impromptu stuff to get back into the habit. Some people are wise enough to do their writing in private and then only share the good stuff, and I aspire to do that too, but, baby steps. I need to find out what I even can write about. Posting my literary flailings online is a way of reminding / reassuring myself that I don’t need to be beholden to what anyone else thinks of me to have value. What value that may be is a Mystery that I don’t expect to crack in this lifetime, but here’s going on faith.

memento mori and eternal life

a thought experiment

why are you here?
what should you do?
how can you see past your hurts and your wants and your worries to do the right thing?

well
what if you weren’t here at all?

what if you had already passed, and the world kept on going without you, as it was always bound to do?

what would you want for that world?

miracle of miracles, today you have a gift of one extra day you can give.
how can a person who isn’t here manifest action in the world?
that’s the miracle, that though you’re not here, here you are. whatever shape this day may take, you can still give to it.

all there is is this magnificent all that is.
amazing that it’s still so beautiful, so storm-tossed, so heartbreaking, without you, but it is!

and since you are already gone, you are already becoming acquainted with the world beyond, that which isn’t yours and never was, but which bears your stamp indelibly, always visible there in the big long view, a complex flower in a seemingly endless field.

this your world will not change at all when the gifts of days run out, because you loved it from the outside and all your love remains.
where you cursed the world, the scars are there in their time, eternally;
the fruits of your gifts are also there in their time, eternally.

how blessed you are to have died and embarked on eternal life before the days of your influence came to an end.

.

Two degrees above freezing

drip drip drip

The trees and the buildings, awnings, doorways are raining. Out in the open, the air is clear, fresh, a little lively.

A flood of melting snow soaks the earth, gurgles down storm drains. Slush piles up, making curbs into treacherous puddles.

In the leafless trees just a little way back from the main street, it sounds like some of the birds are having a party. Their cheerful chatter can be heard from over a block away.

On struggles regarding reading the bible

This is a response to Beth Demme’s thoughtful post, I’m Normal And I Read The Bible.

I was raised to believe that the Bible held all the answers I would ever need in life.  At ten years old I watched my father — a preacher in a small fundamentalist congregation — search for a way to prove the book’s divinity to potential converts, and then to himself. When he failed to find proof, he left the ministry and abandoned his belief in God. In my exploding teen years I came to see the text as arrogant, overdemanding, blindered… how could it blanketly deny all those other spiritual paths that maintained just as vehemently to have their own revelations?  Talking to other members of the church about my concerns made me feel like I was trapped in an asylum of Stepford wives and that I would never get straight answers there.  I determined to study more of the world’s religions and make peace with God on my own terms… In university I denounced the concept of a personal God (the “old man in the clouds”).  I studied cognitive science, artificial intelligence, philosophy, eastern mysticism, and meditation.

My heart remained convinced  that this existence matters profoundly, and that even the vicious brutality of things like bone cancer in children — which speakers like Stephen Fry use with great effect to make YHWH look like an evil psychopath that only a mind-control victim would have any interest in following — could somehow be redeemed by love.  Passages from the Bible resonate with me as speaking deep and honest truth about the nature and purpose of this existence we find ourselves in, and so I can’t stop delving into the “Word” for direction on who to be, and how to be.

My sweetheart, in trying to understand what I meant by insisting I still place a high importance on faith, asked me “how do you know this isn’t just brainwashing from all the indoctrination you received as a child?”  I can’t prove that it isn’t.

There are things in the Bible that fill me with horror.

If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them: Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear. — Deuteronomy 21:18-21

My blood runs cold.  Let me tell you about abusive parents whose children turned to rebellion and drunkenness to self-medicate and preserve any sense of self-worth in the face of soul-crushing gaslighting from their (also abused) parents.  Should these kids be murdered to preserve the smooth functioning of a tribe that doesn’t know how to love its children?

Now go and smite Amalek and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.’” — 1 Samuel 15:3

????? 

 And there are the oft-trotted out proscriptions against both homosexuality and the eating of shellfish as “abominations”. Some argue that the Old Testament law no longer applies to Christians, whose message of grace supplants the legalism of the brutal early days of Jewish tribalism. There are a lot of separate issues here.

I don’t expect to ever find an intellectual algorithm which I will find authoritative in justifying the cherry-picking of any subset of passages as Law…. and my (God-given?) intelligence rebels vehemently against accepting the book whole-cloth according to the democratic interpretations of any denomination or school of thought.  If the Book is divine, I have to see it as divinely appointed to be wrestled with by each of us, the way Jacob wrestled with the angel for his blessing and his revelation.

Passages like those quoted above compel me to treat the Bible to this day as an unfathomable mystery, something that screams out to me constantly that it contains THE TRUTH, but which presents itself to my intellect as more of an angelic sparring partner than a guru I can submit to.  My childhood turned me into an anti-authoritarian.  A libertarian.  A masochist seething with rage against those who would dominate me.

And yet when I read so much of the Bible my heart sings out in resonance and says YES, this describes life more accurately than any ideology I’ve ever heard put forward.

I believe that the story of Jonah tells the dead truth about the consequences of not following the dictates of our conscience.  As long as we’re not doing what we feel we need to be doing, not just our selves are in danger, but violent storms are ravaging the lives of all those around us.

I believe we are not fighting against flesh-and-blood enemies, but against evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against mighty powers in this dark world, and against evil spirits in the heavenly places.  I believe that selling one’s soul to Satan, so-to-speak, (setting one’s will on a goal and to hell with the consequences) is the de facto way to get ahead in this world, and the ultimate consequences of it are every bit as bloody as all of Western literature depicts.  Take Dorian Gray for a godless libertine’s take on the same old old story.

I believe that we can choose to make a commitment that you could call “being born again in the spirit” as a real and only option for breaking all the symbiotic vampiric contracts by which we trade our innocence and honesty and ability to see each other clearly for various concessions, secrets, ways of hiding our selfishness, embarrassment, and moral ugliness, though we can never hide it from the real innocents who like children still see in an instant which emperors are naked and which are wearing clothes.

The Bible is not the only place I find vistas of wisdom.  I’ve written about some of these on this blog (e.g., Orpheus, the Bhagavad Gita).

But as for reading the Bible…

Though the rewards of reading the text are great, I don’t do it very often.  Out of pride, out of not wanting to be allied with arrogant ideologues, out of fear of getting sucked back into a mental box where I feel under obligation to parrot a party line.

There are very few sections that I am presently reading with any intensity.  The skeleton that holds my studies in place is Matthew 22:36-40:

³⁶ “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

³⁷ Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’^{[a] 38} This is the first and greatest commandment. ³⁹ And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’^{[b] 40} All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

That’s one I can get behind whole-heartedly and I try to let it inform my actions daily.

But I feel guilt about not reading / wrestling with more of the Book, because I also believe that the description of the “Full Armour of God” in Ephesians contains the truth about how to defend ourselves spiritually in order to remain free and capable to do what is right whenever it is called for.  And the sword of the Spirit is said to be God’s word.  When Jesus is tempted in the desert he quotes scripture every time to escape the temptations of the devil.  So I do feel unarmed without a better understanding of this baffling, mysterious, mind-wracking scripture.

Here is what matters right now. I need you to know:

I will listen to you.
I will take your perspective seriously.
I will not ignore or stereotype the way you see religion or reality just because it doesn’t agree with this path here that I am on.  It is so important to me to keep comparing perspectives.

It hurts sometimes when I try to talk with people about this struggle that is such a big part of my consciousness and, well, a lot of people have a lot of very good reasons for not wanting to engage at all.  I feel utterly alone on this journey so often, and I’ve embraced that as probably an essential part of the business of living.  But if you want to tell me about the path you are on, I want to hear it.

One thing is not going to happen

Perfect parents are not going to appear to us in our adulthood, healing us of all the wounds we suffered in childhood, picking us up and providing for every one of our needs for the rest of our lives.

or…?

The promise of Christianity seems to be exactly that: a Heavenly Father who cares, provides, disciplines and educates in His ways. I find it hard not to sympathize with those who see this as the ultimate wish-fulfillment fantasy, right up there with life after death. But if it works? What is the cost to find out? We are told that the cost is to love the creator of all that is with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. And if by doing so, we find that all our needs truly are met, is the cost too high? We don’t want to become slaves to dogma. We are asked to become slaves only to love. Could we imagine a better master?

It seems like a better plan of action than sitting around sulking and waiting for the great Parental Apology and Amends anyway… that one hasn’t worked out too well for me so far.

French vs. English coffee pot

The makers of my coffee pot seem to have a much higher regard for francophone coffee brewers than for us anglos.

French instructions:

Warning: If removed during filtering, replace pot within 30 seconds to prevent burns caused by hot overflowing coffee.

English instructions:

WARNING, TO AVOID BREAKING OR INJURY:
DO NOT BUMP, HEAT EMPTY OR BOIL LIQUIDS IN THIS POT
DO NOT CLEAN WITH MATERIALS THAT SCRATCH
DO NOT USE ON ANY RANGETOP OR HOT PLATE
DO NOT HOLD OVER PEOPLE
THROW AWAY IF CRACKED, SCRATCHED OR HEATED EMPTY

♥