As I sit here watching the baby stirring, I wonder “how long” and “can I write this in time?” I don’t even know what I am writing. I sat down here with the vaguest of ideas about capturing my recent experiences in therapy. Still, it is hard to know where to start.
I suppose I could begin with the arguments I have been having with my daughter. These violent clashes have been escalating for some time, and it didn’t take a genius to know that something was wrong.
I could also start with my relationship. J. and I were separated five years ago, and after we came back together we had made certain agreements that seemed in need of fine tuning. The most obvious of them was finances. We have been living beyond our means for some time, and I had agreed to take on the bulk of the financial burden for the family. I have struggled to figure out how to do this, and nearly had the job that would have put me on the road to a secure financial destiny, but as of yet I am without success.
Lastly, I could start with myself. As part of the condition to meet those financial goals, I had gone back to school seeking a graduate degree. Unfortunately getting the degree had proven harder than I imagined, as the nature of attaining an MFA in Art is highly subjective, the hurdles illusory. My own stubborn pride in my talent and intellect, coupled with the like-minded faculty turned out to be poison for me. For years I struggled against the invisible foe that took on the guise of ivory towered academia. While I managed to eek out one Masters Degree, in the end my graduate experience ended in a whimper.
I paused here because I thought the baby was stirring. I reread the passages above to find my voice to continue, and found that I couldn’t. None of these places seem like the place I want to start. Though I have been in counseling for all of them, none of them seems like the thread that touches the depths of discomfort that signifies brutal honesty.
I guess I need to ask myself what brutal honesty looks like. What makes me uncomfortable??? What makes me so crazy that I would literally crawl out of my skin if the topic were brought up? My failure as a parent? A husband? A person? What would it take? In my last meeting with my personal therapist I think he was suggesting that this is part of the problem. That I ride comfortably in the wake of these facts without really taking the risk of confronting my own fears and thus live blind to them and, ultimately, at their mercy.
Is anyone so different?
I want to try to take a stab, but I know that any fear I list here would just be the fear that I am comfortable telling you about. I sincerely doubt that I could blog about something so personal, so raw. I mean I fear failure in my relationship with my wife. It is why I am obsessed with tending to her moods, why I am so unwilling to be comfortable in a place when I know that she is mad at me. I don’t want people pissed off at me, I mean, no one does. But I am so afraid of it that I will go out of my way to make sure everyone is happy. I suspect that this is because I was so afraid of my father as a child. But also, because I was bullied by my peers and never really learned how to related to anyone without being pacifistic.
There are exceptions of course. I mean, there is nothing I can do about the Graduate faculty. I am done there. There opinion of me no longer holds any sway. But perhaps this is because I am done there. I have no more emotional investment with these people so I am no longer so obsequious to them.
I have to pause here, because, when I sat down to write I really had no idea what I was writing about, and now I have come to a place where I am, well, obsequious. It might take a moment to get used to. I have to try on that word and see it if will fit. I am not sure it does, but I want to be sure. I hesitate here because I know myself to be willful and independent. I have a clear vision of my identity. I know who I am, where I came from and who I want to be. But perhaps being willfully independent it just a cover for my fears. Because if I am independent then, I don’t have to answer to anyone, and if I had to answer to anyone then I would be, well obsequious.
Have you looked it up yet or do you know the meaning of the word? I thought I did. I thought it mean servile. But when I looked it up just now I discovered that it has a slightly different meaning, one that I think is apropos. It comes from the Latin obsequium and it means “compliance” or more literally, ob- toward + sequi to follow. So it means “a follower” a “tagalong.” You know I sometimes think I am never going to really know myself. But I can tell you this about myself. As a child my family moved around a lot. As a result I often had to make new friends, I had to reintegrate myself into new groups time and time again. As a result I became a stupendous follower…
Well this has been fun, but the baby woke up. Maybe we should talk like this again soon.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
rebirth
I haven’t blogged in a while which means I have a reservoir of topics that have built up over time. The one that stands out I had shortly after Easter, where I realized that the subtle shift from celebrating the rite of Spring to celebrating the resurrection of Jesus meant that our focus on the passage of one season into the next was co-opted or perhaps a better word is transformed from being about the world to being in the world. We went from thinking about seasons to thinking about Man, or specifically one man, and his power over death. What is that relationship? That is, what is his relationship to death? What is our relationship to him? And what does that all mean about our relationship to God? All came into question, and at the same time it pushed out questions like: What does it mean to be one of the myriad living things one this planet, all of which are mortal? What do we understand about the cycles of life and death that we see all around us? What does this mean to me, personally? And so on. Christianity, for me, messed with the cycle. It went from being about the cycle, to being about the man. And thinking about man, as the only important thing worth thinking about has created a lot of trouble for mankind over the years.
I am not really about basing Jesus or Christianity, after all Easter is about rebirth. It is about a death and a resurrection. It doesn’t get much more cyclical that that right? I mean there are plenty of religions that have the same motif; the death/rebirth of Osiris springs to mind, or the Fischer King, civilization is replete with the standard. What do I hope to add but a little Jesus bashing? Except to day that I can’t think of anyone who has ever colored the Easter event for me in such a way as to make it synonymous with the little green shoots popping out of the earth, or the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees and the moon up above. No, the story of Easter for me was always about chocolate and eggs and a Rabbit. The story of the Crucifixion of Jesus was always told to me like I was one of the members of the crowd who had gathered to see the spectacle. Far from understanding the story as part of a cycle of rebirth, Easter, for me, was about shouting “Crucify Him!” flowed immediately but a two nights and a day of guilt that is conveniently pacified in the end with scads of chocolate and a ham.
No, I am not a Christian basher. There are other that do the job far better than I could ever hope, no my job, here, is for me to muddle out what all this mean to me. What does it mean to me? I mean, for example, why are cycles important, why it the question important? Is this just another, we need to get in touch with the cycles of Mother Earth, Green, Hippie, Lovefest? Is this just another rant that ends in someone telling me that God is really the Goddess and that instead of driving my car I should be biking and planting a tree and eating local foods? Because, if it is, I don’t want to read it. Scratch that. I don’t want to write it and I sure as Hell don’t want you to read it.
No it is important to me because I am beginning to understand how important it is for me to see my life as a series of cycles. Too long have I imagined the future as the unbroken line extending into the distance without thought about what comes after or before or after or anything at all. Live in the moment. Embrace the now. The now is where consciousness dwells, so too should I dwell there for to live in the now is to be enlightened. I am guilty of thinking this way, while all around me I see the things of the now, coming back around full circle time and time again. Don’t get me wrong. The now is all-important. It differentiates this pass around the loop from the last. But too long have I been so consumed with the now that I have ignored everything else. I have been consumed with the state of my soul. To put it in Christian terms, I have been obsessed with my own redemption. Am I a good man? What does God think of me now? How about Now? And Now? How about Now? Now? Now? Now? I am an arrow, released from the bowstring at birth I have striven towards my target unwaveringly. But the more I sore, the more I think “something feels painfully familiar here.”
Studies show that men are just as hormonal as women. The Men move through cycles, and that our thinking, our very fabric is designed around theses shifts. We are not immune to cycles. The moon passes over our head, the earth turns around the sun, the sun around the center of the galaxy. Yes all of these things are subtle reminders that we are cyclical creatures. Sometimes I am prone to depression, other times I am indomitable. Today I create, tomorrow I sow, on Wednesday I weeps and on Sunday I laugh. The more I strive to understand these cycles, the more I come to understand myself.
In writing this piece I had a vision of a story of a man who owned a rat, or possibly a ferret. The longer the man and the ferret lived together, the more the one became like the other, till finally, the ferret had become the man, and the man the pet. For me the Cycle is the Man, the Ferret the Now. They live together in the house of my soul, circling each other. Exchanging information. Slowly learning to live together, slowly learning the others ways. Till one day they awake and look in the mirror and they do not recognize the other. They do not recognize themselves. They are in a frenzy to make sense of it and all around the world seems topsy-turvy. Someone recently called my short stories Kafkaesque, but only I think because I recently woke up and discovered I was a gigantic bug. More and more I think, I am not the bug, I am a man living like a house pet, living like a man, trying to wake up and doing things the only way I know how.
I am not really about basing Jesus or Christianity, after all Easter is about rebirth. It is about a death and a resurrection. It doesn’t get much more cyclical that that right? I mean there are plenty of religions that have the same motif; the death/rebirth of Osiris springs to mind, or the Fischer King, civilization is replete with the standard. What do I hope to add but a little Jesus bashing? Except to day that I can’t think of anyone who has ever colored the Easter event for me in such a way as to make it synonymous with the little green shoots popping out of the earth, or the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees and the moon up above. No, the story of Easter for me was always about chocolate and eggs and a Rabbit. The story of the Crucifixion of Jesus was always told to me like I was one of the members of the crowd who had gathered to see the spectacle. Far from understanding the story as part of a cycle of rebirth, Easter, for me, was about shouting “Crucify Him!” flowed immediately but a two nights and a day of guilt that is conveniently pacified in the end with scads of chocolate and a ham.
No, I am not a Christian basher. There are other that do the job far better than I could ever hope, no my job, here, is for me to muddle out what all this mean to me. What does it mean to me? I mean, for example, why are cycles important, why it the question important? Is this just another, we need to get in touch with the cycles of Mother Earth, Green, Hippie, Lovefest? Is this just another rant that ends in someone telling me that God is really the Goddess and that instead of driving my car I should be biking and planting a tree and eating local foods? Because, if it is, I don’t want to read it. Scratch that. I don’t want to write it and I sure as Hell don’t want you to read it.
No it is important to me because I am beginning to understand how important it is for me to see my life as a series of cycles. Too long have I imagined the future as the unbroken line extending into the distance without thought about what comes after or before or after or anything at all. Live in the moment. Embrace the now. The now is where consciousness dwells, so too should I dwell there for to live in the now is to be enlightened. I am guilty of thinking this way, while all around me I see the things of the now, coming back around full circle time and time again. Don’t get me wrong. The now is all-important. It differentiates this pass around the loop from the last. But too long have I been so consumed with the now that I have ignored everything else. I have been consumed with the state of my soul. To put it in Christian terms, I have been obsessed with my own redemption. Am I a good man? What does God think of me now? How about Now? And Now? How about Now? Now? Now? Now? I am an arrow, released from the bowstring at birth I have striven towards my target unwaveringly. But the more I sore, the more I think “something feels painfully familiar here.”
Studies show that men are just as hormonal as women. The Men move through cycles, and that our thinking, our very fabric is designed around theses shifts. We are not immune to cycles. The moon passes over our head, the earth turns around the sun, the sun around the center of the galaxy. Yes all of these things are subtle reminders that we are cyclical creatures. Sometimes I am prone to depression, other times I am indomitable. Today I create, tomorrow I sow, on Wednesday I weeps and on Sunday I laugh. The more I strive to understand these cycles, the more I come to understand myself.
In writing this piece I had a vision of a story of a man who owned a rat, or possibly a ferret. The longer the man and the ferret lived together, the more the one became like the other, till finally, the ferret had become the man, and the man the pet. For me the Cycle is the Man, the Ferret the Now. They live together in the house of my soul, circling each other. Exchanging information. Slowly learning to live together, slowly learning the others ways. Till one day they awake and look in the mirror and they do not recognize the other. They do not recognize themselves. They are in a frenzy to make sense of it and all around the world seems topsy-turvy. Someone recently called my short stories Kafkaesque, but only I think because I recently woke up and discovered I was a gigantic bug. More and more I think, I am not the bug, I am a man living like a house pet, living like a man, trying to wake up and doing things the only way I know how.
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