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sublingua | |||||
| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
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Lessons and Dreaming: Part I
This has been a really, really hard week emotionally. In some ways it�s been the most devastating week I�ve had in a long time. But it�s also been oddly reassuring. That sounds very strange, I think, but in the last week I�ve learned a lot about the people I know and have come to appreciate the ways in which they teach me about myself. It�s been a week�s worth of lessons about responsibilities and boundaries and about being hurt without being destroyed and about feeling it even when it hurts so badly you can�t talk about it and moving on from it. For a long time I�ve felt and lived as though I were trying to cut all ties between this life and myself. At best, I�ve been waiting for it to be over. Enduring it rather than engaging in it. I�ve ignored what is elemental and have been lost in what is complex and useless and this has meant that I�ve wasted an enormous amount of time. And really, I don�t mean to imply that I think that things don�t take time. Things do take time. They take a lot of time. The incomplete battle with depression took eight years of effort, so and from that alone I learned that even attempts at change take time and work. I mean that this week has been very clear�clear in a way that things almost never are�and the complex beauty of life has been shining out at me from the most unexpected places. People have been wanting to connect in very basic ways and this has been difficult for me to do, but also very necessary for me to do and the outcomes have been strange and beautiful and unexpected and frightening. For example, there is the email dream analysis project going on with Gryphon and that has unexpected led me to a new understanding of a few the underlying prejudices that I harbor within myself. One of the biggest lessons that I have learned from this attempt at analyzing this dream is that I have never quite believed that men are truly human and therefore worthy of my regard. It�s such the paradigm of our society that women are the lightning rods for emotion and I�ve expended a lot of energy avoiding that trap�avoiding shouldering the emotional responsibility for the men I know so that they can live their lives free of emotion. Because of this, I�ve never seen the underside of them really, have never seen the dreamside that exposes the worries that I don�t expect men to have because I don�t believe in them, don�t believe that they are human, don�t believe that they really exist. I don�t expect men to worry about relationships in a meaningful way. I don�t expect men to worry about their skills as parents. I don�t expect men to feel. I don�t expect them to worry about how their children are going to turn out especially when it has been my experience that it is disgustingly easy for them to walk away from their own children to pursue their own selfish desires. That has been my view of men for a long time�so long that I take it for granted and build up defenses against any evidence that suggests otherwise. But then there was this dream from this man that I don�t know very well and it reveals this world of concern that I would never have attributed to these beings that I don�t believe in. I realized after much thought that it was only because I didn�t know him so well that the lesson was able to work. Anyone else I could�ve called it a fluke or would have answered a show of sentience with scorn and moved on. But this I was unable to ignore. There may be more to this than I thought at first. There was also another email from Rutgirl, who was questioning the stability of our friendship and how she�s worried that we�re growing apart as friends and how she really felt the need to reconnect with me and how she hoped that it wasn�t too late for us to salvage things. And to be honest, there have been times in the past when I really, really didn�t like her, and what carried me through those times was this sense that I couldn�t let go of her friendship after so long. We�ve been friends for twenty years and I�ve come to see her friendship as one of the constants in my life and I knew then that despite everything that has gone on between us and the fact that, in many ways, we have grown apart, that I wanted to keep her friendship. It also made me think about the cyclical nature of everything, including friendships and made me know that I believe it in a way that is elemental. I sent her back a long email telling her this�or trying to tell her this anyway�and trying to reassure her about the primacy of our connection.
More lies:
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