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.
I’m nervous as all get out tonight and I don’t really know why but I can say for sure that part of it is exemplified in how long it has taken me to make another blog post.
Cohesive senses of identity are difficult for neurodivergents like myself who have goldfish level attention to the present unless the deepseated passion quota within is met.
As a father and a husband I find myself struggling between the pragmatic mercantilism of St. Francis of Assisis father and the universal trustful love of St. Francis as if there were no way to balance the two.
I’m torn; comparing myself to the subjective standard of success I see in others and my fear of not measuring up to the imaginary ‘standard’.. all the while fearing the giving up of better heavenly real estate, my truest goal because I could only ever justify being a capitalist in the kingdom of heaven because I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work very well for human nature down here on planet earth.
And yet somewhere deep inside my conflict (deep conflict) is that I of assurety believe in balance and yet I desire for the extremes of childlike trust in God and radical trust in His free miraculous work through His creation like I knew in my youth.
What do I need to become not only who I used to be but the next chapter of me?
Am I perhaps meant to be both? Sometimes a turned page is merely the front and back of one turned page.
I’m convinced I’m too young for a midlife crises but perhaps I’m early! If I die before I’m old perhaps I’ll have the luxury to live before I’m dead.
As a guy I knew once said.. “I don’t know what I’m doing and so can you.”
Original clay and mixed digital media art by me: “Blood and Water”.
Le sigh for my se la vie. For my vitality you see I just need to just be.
I often write to get my edge off when nothing else suffices, nothing else cuts it.. nothing else works.
I don’t really understand this world sometimes but knowing it understands me sometimes is a real cure for depression.
Yes I said cure and yes I only said it to spite the backlash of ‘factscism’. Sure it might not be the cure the test tube demonstrated but life doesn’t always happen in a test tube either baby.
Today is me and my wife’s 3rd wedding anniversary. A beautiful day and a cure to my ails all it’s own but even so today had it’s inner challenges for me. My desires to be more, to give more, to provide more, my ‘perfectionisms’ are riding on me and exhausting me.
Business associates not cooperating with me and returning emails so I’m stuck and cannot work because of technical issues. A pine tree fell on a power line down the road from my house so we couldn’t cook at home for our anniversary but had to go to my parents .
…Update: I just returned to this draft half a month later. We survived and had a good dinner. All is well.
Problems really seem more problematic when they’re happening.
The usual trifle of a mastermind is their undoing but there is a mastermind of daunting courage, accidental lack of ego and yet an individualism that “seeks not its own.” yet “lacks nothing” and is “perfectly equipped for every good work.”
‘The usual trifle of the Mastermind is the ‘truffle’ of the Mastermind. Wishing to escape the watching eyes of commoners presumed swine that are in their common simplicity the sign and signat of that primeval connective singularity of all beings the mastermind alone presumes to be the all seeing eye..and yet..”the spiritual man judgeth all things and yet is judged by no one.”
This is Yin and Yang, Light and Dark, Batman and Robin.
Shadows have the tendency to reveal the truth.
Just as Sherlock Holmes might make a game of wits with a man of wits similar and the chess game that interweaves as we see consciousness show mysteries, that is the mystery of evil and the mystery of good.
How does one of similar temperament and comportment as another choose evil or good?
How many of us truly ever meet our archnemesis?
The arechtypical mastermind is not entirely evil and vile.
The Benevolent Ego of the good Mastermind absorbs into the all.
Whilst being an individual self he is at the service of all.
While being egoless he has become all.
While the evil mastermind secures his fortress the good mastermind makes a glass house.
Through accountability is wrot tranquility for accountability is “to be known” by another name.
The evil mastermind secures his own house. When the good leader rules he secures homes for all.
Two houses all and all and great the potential dirges for if either were to fall and yet one shares generosity with urgency the other clenches stones and gold alike.
Like a dark prince of shimmering, ethereal and uncreated light so is the rarity of this egoless gift to humanity.
He/she calls back the valor of the medieval knights of lore. He is victorious and powerful and has found the white stone with his name on it. His name will never be blotted out.
May we all strive for such egoless truth of existence.
There’s an old saying called “Be careful what you wish for… you just might get it.” and I must say it’s true, specifically in successful neurodivergent masking escapades.
I remember growing up feeling like the one disconnected, never sure how the constant interchange of drama and ideas unfolded so naturally.. and yet they did; constantly with neurotypical people!
People didn’t censor themselves nor screen themselves and at times may have even been vulgar and all was fine but if I screened myself into a frenzy I still came up short almost as if I had shown up to English class with math notes.
I longed for the acceptance of the in crowd and yet I saw the vanity and lack of depth present in many common interchanges..as well as the points of hidden depth in everyday people’s intercommunication, usually unseen by the in crowd themselves.
In a way this always made me a peace maker of sorts because I came to the protection of what people took for granted and I saw hidden beauty where others saw nothing.
Details oriented, often missing the forest for the forgotten tree shrub and yet I was well aware that that tree shrub is what forests were made of.
I knew it.. because I was that tree shrub..forgotten in the forest.
I remember sometime into my early twenties through various meditative techniques, cognitive behavioral changes and techniques as well as having been brought into a more healthy close friend community that I was somewhat learning how to operate in community even if it was community as married to my ‘monastic’ musings of the same. (Monasticism was the ideological template that helped open me up to a larger community of people. For better clarity my friends ran a community coffee shop and I lived with them for a while. I experienced genuinely what I would call ‘divine love’ in that family and the community that surrounded them )
Always seeing in the thing the thing the others didn’t see. Seeing the Transcendent value in the common place. Seeing the monastery in the community coffee shop or in the “home for wayward boys.”
I knew it.. because I was that tree shrub..forgotten in the forest.
I really was a lost boy and I revisit that often.
Ironically I could even say that the Messiah figure in my life has often returned me to Peter Pan like musings.
Surely it makes sense because the mature man will need to be willing to sacrifice egoistic preference for the greatest good and yet Pan becomes a crony corporate business man when he forgets his soul. The childlike imaginative in us all that becomes the healer of the aching body of the mind that forgot, it’s soaring soul!
Like the old gospel song said “I’ll fly away oh glory I’ll fly away!” sometimes returning to the simple childlikeness that eschews egotism without making a spiritual or virtuous activity out of it is that noble task rarely taken. The Pan man never lost his ability to fly because he maintained those ‘happy thoughts’.
How this relates to my life is sometimes I have felt genuine and I have felt the pressure to “get to work” as it were and to attempt to forget my happy thoughts, that place of no neurodiveregent masking in preference for neurotypical poker face.
Noone can easily describe or know how hard this experience can be. Much like having the FCC in your head at all time censoring everything your’e ready to say or do and having to change course and rechannel your energy typicalizing the neuro non typical many times feels like an oppressive act of internal self violence and yet this world is very violent.
I like to see how some of the biblical prophets only found divinity when they went “outside of the camp/ city gates” and this is how I have felt this past year and a quarter+ whilst I’ve shunned societal going ons, retreated ever inward and thought about how I might change society in the only way possible by helping it embrace its highest self by practicing what I wish to preach. The truth of the matter is that noone who changes and “becomes new” has become something novel but rather something ancient. “The good man brings forth treasures old and new.” and I guess I’m an old soul.
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.
Musings of a Picture Frame Conversationalist. 