Imagine deep within your soul you want to give gifts to the world..but then life happens and you get tired.
Imagine having the passion of a Content Creator but not knowing how to put your thoughts into words.
What am I protecting? Is this modesty.. its own form of honesty?
In order to be a popular platform poster you need to “post every day” or at least a few times a week.
Ah
That might not work then.
Where is the passion I’m looking for? Where is the spirituality I once had or the zeal for living life as if this life is a rare commodity?
How do I take life for granted so much? How do I lounge in carefree boredom narcolepsy or not? Am I pregaming my midlife crises, getting ready for it, double fisting it?
Seems like a me thing to schedule such a thing rather than to be surprised by it.
Well why on earth am I surprised that there’s no element of surprise when I feel like I already know what the book of my life is about..like God and I deliberated and threw the book at me?
Sometimes I feel like I have some crystal ball or a blueprint to my life in my subconscious mind. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want the left hand to know what the right hand is doing. I’m tired of it. I’m tired of watching my movie from the outside.
Life and the enjoyment of life seems rather to be that the eyes and the ears and the nose would hear, see and smell what is here or at least whatever senses we have available to us. So strange that even Spiritual Doctors have remarked on sense “All knowledge comes through the senses.” Good job St. Thomas Aquinas for being like the Doubting apostle in your search for faith. I feel that heartily.
So there is that darkness in the soul of understanding (nous) to wit my life gives reference that I keep remembering that I don’t know and I do know. Part of me know my spirit though living in my body and not separate has separate agencies, faculties and ‘abilities’. I find it hard to be a gnostic because I’m an earthen vessel and yet though trying not to be “too heavenly minded to be of any earthly good” I find myself trapped between worlds, like a ghost with a preternatural stain on the ink blot tests of the collective unconscious of this age.
In my heart I watch kingdoms rise and fall revolutions turn and the sun set many a year. The ages of time acquiesce to an Apocalyptic dance that never seems to end. All of this is beautiful and is a verdict to my and the worlds mortality. I hope that I can learn lessons of this knowing that “the spirit gives life and the flesh is of no avail.” so that perhaps life can come to my dry bones again.
It is easier than people think for you to have an opinion when people are listening; contrary to the modern proverb “You can’t even have an opinion anymore.”
I know this because I wanted to be heard for years.
I had been glossed over. I had been forgotten. I had been passed over.
For about 5 or so recent years though I was performing live very regular as performing artist/ musician and in what could be considered a pendulum between a new entertainment extroversion to never before experienced levels and on the flip side semi extreme hermitism.
Then in comes the pandemic and I assume the role of a stay at home dad, the multimillion dollar company that used to pump posts about the show I leaded was no longer boosting my content with consistent and gratuitous amounts of ad revenue and that even in cahoots with some of my personal accounts.
The connection of my activity to Facebook translated mysteriously into my person seemingly having value to said algorithm (even if I wasn’t by any means even close to making the type of money the company I worked for was). To all possible intellectualization I could make out however, that the algorithm believed I was famous whether I was much at all. I was noticed somewhat. I was heard. I wasn’t so passed over.
Let me give you one lesson though. Facebook is not censoring you because they do not like you. Facebook just isn’t ‘boosting you’ because you aren’t making them money. At that time I was but now the algorithm believes I am noone, caput, basically a nobody.
This is the sad value testimony of human value in our crapitalist society. Nothing is usually popular in the way it was in ancient Athens.. back when intellectual values, philosophy of ideas and metaphysics were valuable of their own accord and merely for the fact of having mused upon them and nursed them into schools of thought. Now even that value is worthless unless it’s ready to pay the piper. I wonder how much money Facebook wastes not investing in these ideas. But I guess every time a toilet flushes at Walmart a tax deduction angel gets its wings!
So I’m settling in to a more long lasting version of my hermitage but I would be lying if I said that my depression has been totally at bay.
And yet still I’m doing something that some in the medicine/ science only crowd might think muddies the waters into dangerous hippy sentimentalist territory. I’m taking alot of walks in nature, exercising, taking my cbd, eating better, avoiding excessive alcohol or cussing at puppies and of course writing my blog as one part of my weekly healing process.
And you know what .. it helps; because sometimes even after a good helping of protein rich organic peanut butter pancakes.. on a rainy day, when your mind is racing and the sleep disorder demons have clocked out, they need someone to pick up a shift and of course the depression demons are ready and rearing to go. Even so when I write it out it has been transmitted from the realm of thoughts to the realm of words and in my subjective pseudoscientific opinion it seems to help.
I always knew I was an ‘ideas person’. I was always desperate to be stuck in a college academia library studying theology, philosophy, science, physics, social theory (EVERYTHING)!
I have always been mad that whatever secret branch of the government that hires for think tanks hasn’t broke their silence and reached out to me yet. But patience is a virtue after all! Le-sigh.
Re-sign. That’s my miraculous auto predict shake out of writers block! And that’s precisely what I’m getting to now.
The first step to embracing and truly enjoying solitude is getting past the loneliness and just because I’m married doesn’t mean I don’t get lonely when it’s just me and my daughter during the day. Yes.. even with my daughter there I get lonely sometimes and that’s ok even if her just being there really really helps!
You see loneliness is no respecter of persons. And yet perhaps its more helpful and comfortable to be all St. Francis like and call her Sister Loneliness.
Loneliness is like engaging a Jericho wall and sometimes you just got to blast a trumpet in your heart and shake yourself up a little to get past the false barriers it suggests and remember somehow, right now, life is still being lived.
You also must be humble if your’e more the type to be desirous of the hermit lifestyle because whether Pentupium Introvert 5.0 or not you just have to face the music that people aren’t always terrible and in many ways many of them are much better than you… and that’s ok! After all you have your own strengths and weaknesses too!
Most saints probably don’t mantra on that word too much or at the least they think it means something different than most people think it means.
So also a healthy hermit has to be humble and it is as intriguingly intricate as this idiomatic tongue twister.
The healthy hermit is the balance of ones needs and “the Others” needs.. whichever other or Other that may be.
Healthy solitude is a gift for a heart that is healing. It is the opposite of the crusted bitterness of undealt with trauma. The deep irony for he, she or they that seek solitude is this.. one can only seek solitude well as they find a supporting cast.
(A little poem comment I wrote for y’all antimaskers. )
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. So the fear of the Lord isn’t an end in itself. Is it fear to avoid hell which is worthy to fear and then say to the sick..go now physician and heal thyself?
Jesus said preach and heal is thy task. Where many words are -sin will not be lacking..so why oh erudite soul wont you please wear a mask?
If the Lord is to fear and the punishments of hell and to heal and to preach is thy mission pray tell..can you not also protect another’s mortal shell?
You know it is written as has been duly known by the beautiful Jewish messiah bethroned that what’s done to the least of these is done to His own.
Therefore if you quibble at a small ethical task …can your master charge you in the big if you can’t wear a mask?
Wear a mask ,wear a mask is all that they ask during pandemic plagues do the wise “cancel’ that?
Elephants work for peanuts and GOPple them fast..if it could save some one you know WHO’d appreciate that…
Most kindly then till the coast clears .. for the least of these “that” will you do them a favor.. wont you please wear a mask?!
This message is approved by James Dillon Broxson. Thank you Kay Ivey for extending the mask mandate and listening to our public health officials. It means the world to us that you are trying your best to put people before politics on this issue. A good and ethical bipartisan and science following move. Legacy comes from doing the right thing over merely following a brand. We appreciate it.
UPDATE { I SPOKE TO FAST… SHE CHANGED THE MASK ORDER TO A CHOICE THING. GOOD GRIEF!!!}
P.S. I’m glad she did the right thing for a while but I guess politicking is an endless pressure. “Shaking my head. “
Around ten years ago or so I was going through my own “Love Supreme” conversion.
I had touched a darkness in my life that I didn’t know I could touch and I contacted a vital life inside of myself that I didn’t know I could contact.
Contrast. Light and Dark. The Logos that fills all things.
And yes I was truly jiving to some Coltrane as was I also giving Christ control again through the subtle and perhaps unwitting spiritual leadership of the mixtapes of my good friend Jonni Greth.
Having a taste for the Avant Garde, Jonni being raised in a very EVANGELICAL background had embraced Christ deeply but almost seemingly in spite of the spiritual milieu and atmosphere about himself. This I always respected and even if he didn’t know it it often made me receive helpful wisdom from him almost as if he were some closed off Jedi hermit.. Which for a hermitic like soul like mine made for an attractive candidate.
If that had not been enough he also had the gifting to express those life experiences of the ‘solitudinal’ heart through song.
Jonni Greth introduced me to Daniel Johnston and copious amounts of outsider art and music, the depth in the like which I was clearly hungry for and yet through all of this our friendship showed me a sense of desire to nurture the artist in me, something I often felt very few people in the world tried to nurture.
But in the years around 2009 existential miracles happened in my life. Some precipitated by a life fallen away from my faith at the time, being caught up with by youthful indecisions and the untimely wreckedness of far too much imbibing (of various substance); the God of my youth began to become something and better yet someone to me again.. the presence of an old long lost friend.
Somewhere between breakups with people I didn’t honestly date but merely had deep emo college infatuations with and the sentiment that some sort of Aspergian colored cloud contrasting between genius possibilities and social catastrophes was my plight, I would finally, somehow, gain a notch in my proverbial life belt.
All of my fellow musician friends knew me as ‘that dude who would probably never get ahead or make anything worthwhile happen with music’ but slowly, somehow, like the slow tick of the oil drip leaving my white Chevrolet Astro van dry, a dry artist through experience and near caveman from primordial goo level emerging, I came seemingly out of nothing into existence for the first time.
“I had a panic attack in psychology class but with the guitar on my back no confidence lacked.” (Excerpt from a song I’m working on.)
But indeed it was true. One day a college infatuation of mine, whom I had been sitting behind in psychology class on the first day of class, having a panic attack when the teacher merely called for me to introduce myself, would be the girl I got the confidence to sing my song I wrote for her in the parking lot there at Pensacola Community College (as they used to call it).
She said “How is it that you have panic attacks to introduce yourself but behind a guitar your so confident?!”
A song Hosea was born. Next was Bay Leaves. Next “crap!”.. one day in my inner battle to remain atheist I had my secular humanism lead me back to Jesus (we’ll save that one for another blog. Hyperlink will be updated!)
Then another day walking through the mall like an anthropologist studying people and buying nothing as I often did, I walked into a Ross Dress for Less and stumbled upon a fortune cookie paper that read as follows…
“You will make a name for yourself in the field of entertainment.”
Things slowly got weird. My car almost broke drown one day on the way to a fund raiser for a Church Hippy Coffee Shop known as the Ole Mug at the Genesis barn in Foley, Alabama but I was all out of money “bless my heart!”
So I stopped by a Tom Thumb right down the road from ‘Flora Bama Bar and Grill’ remembering my guitar in the back of my on-e Chevy Astro Van that was sitting in the seat of my road side salvaged, leather lazy boy for easy back seat sleeping (if I so desired) and with a glint of proverbial providence and road magic went inside and made my pitch to the manager.
I said “sir I am out of gas and I have no money but I have a guitar in the back of my van and I would be more than willing to buy gas if I made some money out on the curb.”
Finding this a different kind of request and looking somewhat amused he accepted my request. I played my heart out in the middle of that summer day and by the end of an hour or so I made 35$! I bought some gas and got at least half a tank and saved the rest for Taco Bell and some as a momento. The fund raiser was over by the time I got to Foley {Isn’t it Ironic}.
The one time event turned into my semi regular gigs on the Gas Station circuit round playing at any gas station or public place I could until one day I thought I might take a chance..again.
I walked into the City Grille in Gulf Shores, Alabama that was newly opened and asked if they ever had live music. They said that they had been looking into doing it but had not booked anyone yet and then asked me if I would like to be one of their first. I WAS IN!
My job was music! One gig turned to 2 turned to I’m playing all week and I was finally good at something..something before that among my friends I was the worst at. Friends had moved away to different parts of the country but even as far as Salt Lake City Utah the word was out that Dillon was writing music and somehow it didn’t suck! What a novel thought!
As time would go by (around 11 years or so now) I have seen my song writers hermit syndrome go way way deep.
That first year and a half or so on the Gulf Coast and I was quickly finding myself drained.
Notwithstanding the facts of my lifelong undiagnosed sleep disorders and other maladies of which I only knew so much.
I was an originals artist in a world ruled by cover singers and it mystified folks how I even got out there as an originals artist ‘gettin gigs’
in the first place.
Though my song writing instincts are deep and most definitely instinctual and though my songwriters hermit syndrome is even deeper I could only say succinctly that I never could have begun getting out there without ‘finding my supporting cast’.
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James Dillon broxson is an artist, musician and content creator. He is married to his wonderful wife Carolina originally from Venezuela and has a beautiful baby girl with her named Eliza. For enquiries email shastat78@gmail.com
Musings of a Picture Frame Conversationalist. 