Anti-Change-Girl and the Journey of Embracing Change

There is a lot of fear in this world.  It keeps everyone from being who they really are, which is beautiful Love, and glorious Light.  You came to this Earth to experience being the Creator of your own reality, to embrace what it means to choose to evolve as a unique and special individual.  

The fear we are all exposed to comes from the uncertainty of this time.  It isn’t a time like any other.  Some compare it to the fall of the Roman Empire, but it really isn’t comparable, because the Roman Empire didn’t completely rely on a finite energy source which was quickly disappearing, like we do.  Their world didn’t have roughly seven billion people on it, either.  So, from my understanding of history, we are experiencing something that has never been experienced before.  Just like every one of us, this situation is unique.

The essence of 2012 is the summation of this uncertainty.  We have all heard talk of Mayan and Zuni prophecies, of the End of the World, and of Extraterrestrial Disclosure.  There is a tremendous amount of fear circling these predictions, and what was but a joking whisper of conspiracy theories has become a rather loud cacophony of differing opinions, disbelief in some, belief in others, and fear abounding.

Out of this noise I keep hearing and reading and hoping and fearing, the only thing that seems to calm my heart and soul is the idea of a massive conscious shift in awareness that we, the human species, must change and embrace drastic change to survive the consequences of our collective actions.  We all live on planet Earth, and most of us would like to keep living here, which means things have got to change.

Change is a scary thing for most people; no one really likes the initial resistance that change brings to your life, so most folks try to avoid it, and then in avoiding it, most lose the ability to control the change.  By not embracing and allowing change to come into your life, and by not changing how you think about and identify with change, it has been my experience that change winds up controlling you.  What I mean by this is difficult to communicate in words.  I will paint a picture.

Once upon a time there was a girl who was forced to move to Canada by her Evil-Parents.  Her Evil-Parents had made a decision about her life, without consulting her, that they would move to Canada in the hopes of pursuing a better, more successful and bountiful future.  No one seemed to give a rats ass about what the little girl wanted, and shrugged off her vocalized hurt by saying repeatedly that the “change would be good for her in the long run.”  Huh, whatever that meant. to Anti-Change Girl, that was a death sentence, because life in her perspective was more about playing and less about years passing than it was for her more wizened parents.  

Anti-Change-Girl decided she would be aggressive and rude in approaching this change of place and experience.  She resisted it by placing a massive flag of her native nation outside her window.  She protested by screaming “America is better than Canada!” while biking around her neighborhood.  She got into fisticuffs with boys who called her a boy, and not a tomboy (there is a distinct difference, you know), and she refused to wear dresses like the Canada-girls and would pack jeans in her knapsack daily to prevent the enforcement of dress-attire on her by her evil mother, who apparently wanted Anti-Change-Girl to be prissy and Canadian.

Time passed, and Anti-Change-Girl found her niche, like most animals do.  She was an artistic tomboy who loved nature who sought to extend kindness wherever she went.  Most people didn’t really know what to do with her, but she had friends, and wound up loving Canada.  One day, her Evil Parents decided to change her life without consulting her, and moved back to the United States.  Anti-Change-Girl had to try to fit in once more in a now foreign native home.  Her “evil” parents had been right in the beginning, when they believed Canada would be good for her, she just didn’t see it until much later, when she recognized that a different nation brought to her the awareness that global diversity is beautiful.

What sparked this altercation in how Anti-Change-Girl views change was the acceptance of Change being the only constant in life.  It was the initial change of moving to a separate country, unique in it’s culture and systems, and then returning to her native land, which caused Anti-Change-Girl to be the different entity she is today, and which will enable Anti-Change-Girl to be more adaptable to the changes facing her and her species.  She had no understanding of this long-time-comprehension as a child, for she had no past to go by and to learn from.

Change is inevitable.  It is why you choose to be here, now.  The only thing you can control is how you think about your reality.  From that thought comes the allowance of the thought being born into material reality, and the allowance guides you to take the actions necessary to create what it is you wish to create in this existence of yours. You are here to be a Creator, are you not?  Anti-Change-Girl needed to alter her understanding of the change of moving, and it took her many decades to do so.  She wound up seeing it as a tremendous learning experience that shaped nearly every aspect of her identity. 

By embracing change as inevitable, and by allowing change into your life to make the life you wish to make, the fear of uncertainty dissipates.  This is what the “mass consciousness shift” is on about, but it all begins with the individual, and grows into the greater human consciousness, and ultimately changes the world, and how the world is experienced by the individual.  

It boils down to how you wish to experience this moment of Now: Do you want to see the Change that you are experiencing in your life as, “Yet another experience where someone is taking advantage of you?”  Do you want to experience change as, “Yet another horrible Trauma that winds up with you as the Victim?”  That will only keep you in a state of victim, continuing to live your past-experience, never moving beyond them.  To move past the hurt and the trauma, the death, and the change, you must see that how you think about those experiences shape how you respond to them.  If you think of an ending as a negative, you will never see the ending as a new beginning! 

How you choose to see yourself shapes your reality.  If you hate how you look, how you feel, and where you are, you will create more hatred, not less.  You will resist change, not embrace it.  You must begin to love and accept yourself, and accept the changes you are now experiencing as inevitable aspects of the human condition.  You are Love manifest in Material form, and to be the change you wish to be in this life, you must accept yourself, and accept the changes not with negativity, but with hope in growth towards a new beginning.

A Wise Shaman once told me that the highest form of Creation is first to think it, then to speak it, then to sing it, and finally, to dance it into being.  What will you dance into being today?

When A Tree Falls

When a tree falls in a forest, does anyone care?
Does anyone give a shit, about a tree?

All I have, all that I am, was given to me, by the planet I stand upon, and by Her trees. The green life. Every cell in my body, well, almost every cell, carries a small organ whose roots can be traced to some of the first beings on this planet which derived their energy from the sun. Via endosymbiosis, that purple photosynthetic bacterium became the mitochondria which were inevitably given to me by my mother, who got them from her mother, all the way back to the first female Homo sapiens.

Can you see the connection? Can you see the link?
The chain of evolutionary history traces my very existence back to photosynthesizing organisms, light-eaters, making me somewhat “one” with all present green life, albeit vaguely. The Matriarch of All I know, all I can touch and experience as life, or that which was once alive, is this planet. This Earth, and her wondrous biosphere.

I owe her everything. She gave me my breath. She gave me my energy. I cannot see Earth as anything but Mother, feminine and holy, sacred and patient. I cannot fathom a lifeless sphere, I cannot tolerate matter without nonmaterial substance. It makes no sense to me, to see a world with no soul, a planet with no heart.

I am a virus on her back, a solitary virus in a sea of human-plaque, our square-like brick ever breeding, always consuming. Consuming is all I do. I am not chloroplast-life, I am mitochondrial-life, and I eat and use and ingest that which is before me. Me, and my seven billion brothers and sisters.

I am a virus who woke up and realized I no longer want to be a virus. I no longer want to thrive on the back of my host, sucking life from her and the species which represent her whole. Don’t they have a voice, too? Don’t they have a say as to what us pink viral primates do with each and every breath that the forest, the green life, more or less, gave to us in billions of years of experience?

If it were me, and I was in the position of Gaia, I would kill us all. I would terminate all life, and let the biosphere begin anew, or close to new. But she won’t be doing the killing, our ever-patient Mother, no, we will be doing it. We will choke on our own filth. We will kill an atmosphere that took three billion years to form. For what, exactly, for money? For power? For the primate-driven need to be Alpha?

Where does patience come into our genes, where do we find a place in our human hearts to stop this maddening consumption and embrace symbiosis?

I don’t think it will ever happen. It isn’t because I am a pessimist. It isn’t because I am depressed. I am those things at times, but I am more often seeking the silver lining than many believe, because I am still alive. I haven’t done myself in, and I do think of it, with all the sorrow I know I create. My house is warmed by ancient sunlight, taken from the Dakotas, the raped hole filled with toxic waste, like semen left in a victim after rape. My isolated life in the mountains exists, all because of ancient sunlight, removed rather impatiently by my need for a warm belly, a warm plate, a warm bed.

All of this is my fault. Not mine alone, no, but for my part, I know. I know I have built structures out of trees that are older than I can comprehend in my pitiful +/-80 year lifespan. I know I fueled up my vehicle with gulf oil after the Deepwater Disaster. I know I eat the shrimp which should be feeding other mammals. I know, and I carry that knowing none too easily.

This knowing keeps me up at night. I can’t get to bed without distraction, and I am addicted to distraction because it keeps me from leaving sooner than my loved ones would like. I cannot do that to them, they love me so much. It would be unfair to my Mother, who links me to this cycle of giving and patience that I can barely comprehend.

So, when a tree falls in a forest, do you give a damn? I know you don’t, nor do I. You wipe your ass with redwood just like most of us. You pick the mucus out of your nose and smear it on a Kleenex, not caring if that Kleenex was once a tree a thousand years old. After all, trees have no feelings. Trees don’t weep when they are cut down. They don’t lash out and smite you as they are toppled by your machines. Hell, matter has no feeling, no conscience, according to the Darwin-world we have all adhered to. We live each day like this, believing a rock carries no worth, aside from it’s usable ore. It is the religion of our era, to see all matter as void of magic, unless of course, that matter is human.

The Elephant and the Crocodile

Had a dream last night. This is it’s tale:

I wondered what to do with the elephant and the crocodile. The crocodile was a rare albino, and the elephant was one of the oldest captive elephants in recorded history. They were starving in their cages, and no amount of peanuts thrown at the elephant could sate his appetite, or remove the weakness from his thin form and give him life again.

The Cheyenne Mountain Zoo had gone bankrupt during the economic depression, and to salvage what they could, sold the animals which weren’t endangered to the strip malls in the hopes that their captivity would remind those shopping of the natural world. Zookeepers became part-time clerks who mucked stalls and prodded depressed beasts awake long enough to make a spectacle for the shoppers.

The government had just done something that made no sense whatsoever. They had made the decision to use small nuclear warheads on American soil. I believe their reason was to detonate the bombs underground in the bottom of deep shafts, to shock the planet into coughing up more fuel to supply our materialist greed. There never is a good reason for nuclear detonation, so I forgot their claim for it’s greatness, except to recall they were using the event to show how they were ‘safely getting rid of nuclear bombs in the name of world peace.’ By using it on us, and not others for a change.

Most Americans didn’t care, and only a handful put up any level of resistance. Those sparse few who found out about it found out too late to make any real change to government action. All our news and internet were now censored propaganda, very much like the internet of Our-Motherland-China, so finding out about anything required a level of tech-knowledge that only a small number of persons possessed.

We had about a day to prepare for the seven warheads striking our Colorado eastern horizon, and could only salvage enough water for a month, but not enough food. I found hoarding food and water to be an act of folly; we were only delaying the inevitable death-by-nuclear-fallout by a month in some unknown future. I tried to gather as much water as I could, but the purest water was to be found in the richest neighborhoods, as they had access to the water which was most cleansed by filtration, and most Americans, myself included, had to make do with fluoridated-arsenic-and-Fukushima-laden tap supply. My father and I had to make a trip to the Broadmoor to find a spring which the public could access, and that was when the nukes hit.

My father was a shadow that followed me everywhere. He’s dead, but his memory and warding protect me throughout life. At times of intense stress, I can make his form out, following me. I was alone when the warheads met the horizon, aside from his ghost. My partner was "safe" and in our shelter in Manitou, but our separation only brought to mind how slim our chances were of seeing each other again, especially if I couldn’t get home with the water before the bombs hit, which was my present situation.

The Broadmoor was decorated with fancy strip malls and promenades, glitzing with the gold and green and red of Christmas, that most spectacular consumer-driven time of material worship. People were out and about, shopping the deals at the promenades, eating out and rutting in the bounty of glitzy things placed before them. Most Americans were too distracted to even notice the mushroom clouds popping up in the distance. Many were crowded around the flat screen tele-stations, little outposts of nonstop entertainment, to watch the current football game, shouting and whooping for their choice teams. I was near one of these tele-stations when I noticed the explosions in the distance. They happened almost instantaneously, blooming upward into the sky and dominating my view. They were surreally beautiful, reds and oranges and purples mingling with the blue and pinks of sunset. It looked like a Maxfield Parrish sky, and for a moment all was silent save for the football game blaring at the tele-station. The quiet seemed like a frequency-wake coming off the explosions, a tsunami of malice, hushing up all life before it. The birds stopped making noise. The cars came to halts in the middle of the thoroughfare, people getting out to witness Death running to meet them.

People began to vacate their cars and the stores and seek shelter. Most of them hadn’t any idea this was going to happen today. Some just laughed and continued watching the football games. I was so brokenhearted, for an instant the football seemed more comforting than anything else in the world. My eyes lingered on the red and white uniforms of the opposing team, watching them chase the ball around like ants hunting a crumb. It gave me a second of peace, but the terror soon welled up inside me. I may never see Beth again. I may die here, in this rich neighborhood, this material-mecca. I may die here...

I ran to a nearby mansion. The woman who owned the mansion had decorated it in the Roman style. She had onyx busts sitting on top of marble pillars, lining her garden which was beside the mall, so she could wander from her house through a garden and into a shopping center, never having to go far for her wants. Her house was decorated with a dark mahogany, each square tile of wood lined with shiny brass, which must have taken hours for her maid to clean. Her kitchen was lined with copper pans and her countertops were made of pink granite. It was decadent, warm, and inviting, so I ran inside through a broken window bordering her front door. Her front door was oak, ornately carved and lined with fleur-de-lis, pineapples, and spirals. A wall of glass flanked the eastern-facing side of the mansion, and I could see the mushrooms ever-expanding in the distance. I wondered if my kindred in the eastern country had made it, but I suspected they had not. When they had given over their property’s mineral rights to the gas company, I suspected they were closer to ground zero than anyone. I tried to phone earlier to warn them, but got no answer.

There were people eating outside the mansion on a deck, which circled the home and connected the owner to a five-star restaurant. The people eating dinner were carrying on as if the explosion hadn’t happened, but some were beginning to wake up from their gourmet-coma and panic at what they saw. I could not keep the tidal wave of people from entering the mansion, and part of me felt safe around more people, knowing that perhaps we could work together to survive this. I kept wondering if I wanted to survive this, and deduced I only wanted to survive if I was with Beth.

The woman who owned the mansion had it well-stocked with food for the coming holiday. It seemed she may be entertaining an army, and her availability of fresh produce was unbelievable. An icebox fridge set at the perfect temperature for vegetables and herbs was filled to the brim with all manner of organic bounty, and the first thing people did was immediately begin raiding her home for food. The woman phoned her home, and I answered. It seemed as though she had been alerted to a break-in, and she was quite irate. I told her that there had been seven nuclear explosions not 100 miles from her home, and that people had run in for cover. She was more concerned about her possessions than she was food or fallout-armageddon, so she aked me to “keep people in check and let them take all the food they want, so long as they keep my stuff alone. I saved for years working in a jewelry shop as a manager to obtain that wealth, and I’d like to keep it with me. It’s all I have.”

I found it to be bizarre that the woman cared less about the destruction of the biosphere supporting her, and the death soon to hit all of us nearby, than she cared about her bloody things. I figured if she didn’t see her food as gold, she wasn’t too bright and I wasn’t going to mention anything about it to her.

We created a feast before us, a feast lacking in meat and animal-products, but oddly nourishing. It gave everyone in the home energy, and it calmed their fears about the looming mushroom clouds in the background. We all believed if we kept ourselves shut up in the house, we may survive the initial fallout. The overall lack of knowledge regarding nuclear fallout was astounding. It was as if everyone believed that if they simply ducked and covered, they’d be okay.

People were looking to me for answers. They saw that I was more prepared than most, that I had an understanding that this event was going to happen before it did, so people began to rely on what I told them. I needed people to forage the nearby mall for items, blankets, foodstuff, and any survival gear or weaponry we could find. I led a team through the Roman-garden and into the mall’s covered promenade.

I figured we would soon have to eat our own kind to survive, and I wanted a crossbow for that moment, if it came. Something to protect myself from ravenous packs of humans seeking weaker human flesh to feed upon. Trauma can cause carnage and a lack of moral compass when it comes to survival. Nuclear fallout addles the logical mind, as well. I was expecting my jaunt back to Manitou to be a violent one, and I sought the sporting goods store for protection.

I found a crossbow and a handgun, and I loaded up. The security guards were as panicked as everyone else, apart from the children, which the parents were keeping calm by placing them around the animal pens in the middle of the mall eatery. Mothers were searching everywhere for peanuts to give to their children, so that the children could feed the elephant. My sister was in the mall, and I was glad to see her, but she seemed to have had some sort of nervous breakdown as she was just giddily kicking her bare feet in the water of the crocodile pond, laughing maniacally as the crocodile would lazily attempt to pull her in. The albino crocodile was so frail it hadn’t the energy to pull anyone in, and my sister found this to be quite hilarious. I looked at the crocodile, it’s ancient eyes glazed over with cataracts. It stared into my soul with a piercing gaze of knowing, it’s eye moistened with tears as it had been weeping. I heard a splash and looked to see the elephant had fallen into the water with the crocodile, it’s trunk lifted above the water level to breathe, it’s skeletal mass struggling to swim. The crocodile didn’t bother with the elephant, their shared years of captivity seemed to have created a level of mutual respect between them. They were alone in a sea of monstrous selfish primates, more kin than enemy. Neither animal attacked the other, both seemed more calm in the same pool of water than they were when separate. I wondered if the people would eat the animals, and I woke from this madness to the sound of a backhoe moving up my street outside my window.

The Worker's Poem.

I am a warehouse worker, I fit in no square peg
My edges are round and fruitful
I stand on obese legs
I work till I am humbled
I slave till I am bent
My fingers they are raw, dear
My neck, it aches, a-burning red

I am a warehouse worker, I stand and repeat moves
Over and over I robot, until the break behooves
My master to shout out, “lunch, last box, or break”
And when that word is uttered, an echo does it make
Around the warehouse floor, the workers they do whoop

And dance and mingle vaguely, and chatter about their hurt.

We are the poor-caste workers,
We stand on pained legs,
Our backs, they are a-broken,
Our souls bent, distorted, strained

All we do is complain, yes, all we do is gripe
About all our suffering, injustice, and crime
Of the few against the many,
Those who can afford the things
We pack and toil over nightly
We covet and we see

The disparagy between our peoples
The many with so few
Packing for the richmen
Packing for, likely, you.
We like to cook, too, you know,
We like to share food with friends,
We are no different from you,
We just have so little at the end

For there are children to feed,
And divorces to pay for,
Health concerns too costly to afford
The likes of Le Creuset and Kitchen Aid

I am a warehouse worker, I’m tired and underfed
My weight comes from my allergies
To subsidized eggs and bread
I have so little energy
I cannot make it said
In adequacy, how angered
The rich have made me red
We packed $800k today
We packed and stumbled home
To bottle, to wife, to bed
Too tired to revolt.

Viking Lament

If things had been the way they were in the Viking Period, none of this would have happened.

Someone would have slandered my wife, and I would have taken an axe to their entire family. End of issue. Their family, in turn, would have complete right to come after my family with axes, and the end result would likely be something along the lines of a big bloody mess where everyone gets killed until a Godi steps in and tells everyone to knock it off.

I wish often that things were this simple. I wish we didn’t have any problem with people that we couldn’t solve with a little bit of slaughter, or the fear of slaughter pushing on everyone’s subconscious to behave. A little bit of death can scare folks into submission to lawful order.

Unfortunately, we have all fallen away from this particular methodology of conflict resolution. Perhaps, in our dystopic future, we will be able to behave in this simplistic and animalistic manner once again. It seems as though we will not be able to evolve.

Community

There’s a lot on my mind lately, and these thoughts have been hindering my creative capacities.
As it has taken so long to get to the stories I’ve been working on, and to post them here, I have decided to just do a little bit of streaming consciousness writing here, to allow myself to become better understood, and to also bring light to the fact that creativity often does not allow itself to be hindered by a set schedule. Oftentimes, creation happens all at once, and sometimes it trickles out of the creator slowly. This kind of activity is universal, and you can see it each time you step outside into Nature. Geographical processes can take millions of years, or minutes.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the topic of community. According to The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary, which is a much better resource than the Macintosh or a free internet dictionary, the word is defined as such:

community
I. A body of individuals. 1. The commons as opp. to peers etc.; the common people. 2. An organized political, municipal, or social body; a body of people living in the same locality; a body of people having religion, profession, etc., in common; a body of nations unified by common interests (freq. w. cap. initial, in the title of an international organization). b. The members of such a body collectively. 3. A monastic, socialistic, etc., body of people living together and holding goods in common. 4. A group of animals etc. living or acting together; Ecol. a group of interdependent plants or animals growing or living together in natural conditions or inhabiting a specified locality.
II. A quality or state. 5. The state of being shared or held in common; joint ownership or liability. 6. (A) common character; (an) agreement; (an) identity. 7. Social intercourse; communion; fellowship, sense of common identity. 8. Commonness, ordinary
“Community.” Def. la. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. 1993. Print.

I feel this particular word is evolving a new meaning, which is the topic of my blog post today. I will return to the more entertaining stories shortly, which have been delayed due to research.

Community implies locality, but with our global interconnectedness brought upon us because of technological advancement, this particular definition of a localized meaning of community must be re-understood.

Perhaps because we are all living on one planet, that is our new definition of community. I have moved to a location where I have chosen a minimal interconnectedness with my peers because I have chosen to work on myself and not my relationships with others outside of myself. This choice defines community. I am in communion and walk a common ground with my Self. I am working to seek love inside of me to further my love with those outside of me, first starting with my partner, Beth. If I can learn to love myself and get to know myself, then I will always have a localized community, and this community will never be tainted by the needs outside of Self. The community of One will follow me everywhere. This is why it is so crucial to look within and to work with the inner self and learn to love yourself and forgive yourself of your faults: if you don’t have yourself, you have no community. After all, the only member of your community who will be guaranteed to be there for you every step of life and even when you die is yourself.

I see so much consternation about the lack of community in our American culture, and how that its absence is the “root of all evil,” and “why we are in the mess we’re in.” Many people blame a lack of community for most of our societal problems. Although I think there is something to be said about this particular lament, I feel it is a skin-deep complaint to a much deeper concern.

The lack of community is ultimately a general lack of forgiveness and extension of love to all aspects of the individual self. The self is a perfect extension of the All: the self is dark, light, grey, evil, hateful, spiteful, compassionate, loving, giving, all at once. We experience this, and some choose to not acknowledge their “Shadow Self,” or as Tori Amos so aptly defines as our “Dark Prince.” Those individuals who deny their darker self do themselves and their communities a great disservice, because the “Dark Prince” is there, and won’t really ever go away. It is lurking in the subconscious, waiting for a chance to get out; to be noticed, even in a moment. Usually, if it goes unacknowledged, it is left unchecked and misunderstood, and manifests itself in the life of the individual in manners which are all too often harmful to that individual, as well as that individuals’ loved ones. The cycle of abuse could be defined as the acting out of the abandoned shadow self, demanding attention by harming those who are closest to the individual inflicting the abuse.

Community seems to lack the definition of the Community of Self. It also seems to lack the more broad definition of members having something in common with others globally. We are an interconnected species, thanks to the Internet. Most of my members of community live hours away, and in many cases, states away. This distance is shortened in an instant with the aid of social networking tools like Facebook. Sure, we all mock Facebook, and I would agree that it isn’t used to it’s full potential, but Facebook pulls many members of a community together, albeit in a manner which hasn’t evolved as fast as it could.

I’d love to see Facebook used for idea exchange, and conversation that allows many people to put in their ideas and hopes, and dark sides, too. It seems that positivity on Facebook is honored, and negativity is condemned, save for the ‘blackish-grey’ exception: complaint, which is prevalent on Facebook walls, and most American conversations.

Perhaps the reason why Facebook is so poor a social tool is because it isn’t allowed to let out the Dark Princes on the Wall? The inner darkness isn’t given a voice on Facebook, and so for the most part, the sense of community lacks there, as well as in real life. Which brings us back to our little dilemma of self.

Everyone would have community, all the time, and be able to be in the state of communion, all the time, if they would learn to get to know their whole selves. Most people don’t take the time, and so far, I’ve seen a whole lot of hiding and defining self as whatever the Self “does,” rather than what the Self chooses “to be.” It’s a difference of verbs. Etre is the French verb meaning, “To be.” The French have an entirely separate word for the act of doing something: Faire. We English speaking North Americans seem to use both being and doing interchangeably. One of the first things people ask you is, “What do you do?” As if the act of doing defines who you are Being. Well, it doesn’t. Just because someone works in a successful occupation as an engineer doesn’t mean that person is successful at Being who they really are.

I observe a lot of hiding in my culture. I even experience a lot of others redefining self as “what you do.” Shakespeare had something going for him when he said, “To be or not to be, that is the question.” It really is the question! The answer to our lack of community is there, hidden between the lines of that little phrase. If an individual chooses to take ten minutes a day and stare at their naked self in a mirror, and try to accept all the darkness, as well as the light and grey, they just might wind up being able to feel more balanced and whole, and actually truly give back to their loved ones, rather than hide from the shadow self and abuse those around them. They might even be able to get to Be whatever it is they came here to experience Being!

The Hermit

"Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking." - Jessamyn West

The Hermit felt awkward around her more sociable cousin, the Firechief. She felt like everyone around her was judging her for being unemployed.

She didn’t really get around to being open with anyone about it. She felt that most people didn’t understand and didn’t want to understand her overall situation or predicament. And so, she kept it unsaid and simply tried to be the person that she felt she was, which was kind, creative, healing and humorous, most of the time, and bitter, hateful, angry, and sullen most of the other time.

The woman felt that she was without question a person who had come a long way and found a long line of things inside of her that most people would never get a chance to experience. Most people, the woman witnessed, would spend their lives hiding behind the Doing and the Chasing-the-dollar schemes and machines rather than learning to become the people of Being that they were. The woman had used her money to discover what this state of Beingness was for her, and she had recently discovered what it was, and was joyous to learn what she wanted to Be, all of the moments of her life: Creator.

The woman felt that this learning experience set her apart from the other animal humans. She felt that most of them thought and believed her to be lazy. She was not lazy, but she was very determined intellectually to sniff out her inadequacies and learn from them. So, she tried to do so. And because of this, she outcast herself.

This is how she came to be known as the Hermit.

Her avoidance of others led them to speculation of who she had become. Her silence allowed their assumption to grow, and in the darkness of that not knowing, their judgments of her, based on past experience, resulted in them never getting an opportunity to truly know her.

This led to her feeling rather awkward around anyone. Her awkwardness lent itself to a feeling that if she spoke of what she had been doing, she would be punished for not having done what was expected of her instead. What was expected of her was for her to utilize her magnificent intellect and become the woman everyone identified with intellect: successful, driven, oriented to goals, single-minded, passionate.

The Hermit was all of these things, but she was these things on a more subtle path than her peers. Their understanding of these successes was flamboyant, of the ego, not the shadow subconscious everyone chooses to hide from daily. No, the people did not consider a mastering of this to be anything special, and if they did, they hid it in jealousy, because their jealousy of not knowing their whole selves drove them to abuse those who did, in a pecking-order that was customary of the ego, but not the subconscious self.

Those who seek to master the shadow self become hermits because no one understands them. No one can comprehend the wonders these questing-masters have discovered inside of their own souls and hearts and minds. They covet this sense of never being alone, and because of that, their jealousy drives the mockery of these Hermit sages.

Walking back to her hovel, knowing it is messy around her, knowing that she has had little reward for her achievements, the Hermit’s ego was hurt each time she stepped out of the house and into the world. She wondered how she might now master the ego. Her ego was one of self-victimization and poor-meisms. She was tired of this behavior as it no longer served her purpose as Creator. And so she set out to find the new learning experience and tackle the ego. Her understanding of the ego was different now, and because she was no longer afraid of it, but acknowledged it as part of her, she was ready to see how she and the ego could coexist and cocreate as a community.

Lessons In Losing A Father.

My Dad used to help me write all my papers. It didn’t matter what age I was or what grade I was in, each paper was important in his eyes. Each paper brought my dad the ability to be the teacher he always was; each paper was a lesson for me to become a better writer under his tutelage.

I was always a procrastinator when it came to writing. It never really mattered what it was about, I’d wait until the last day or two to write it. This even happened with a 20 page independent research paper in college. No matter what, I couldn’t get inspiration to write until there was intense pressure. This was difficult when it came to getting help from my dad.

I can’t count the times he would be up with me helping me the night before a paper was due. He’d often type what I had written shorthand for me, and help me with grammatical errors and shortening of my verbose wording. There’d be times I’d be writing, and he’d go to bed and ask me to wake him up when I needed help with the editing - sometimes I’d be waking him up at 2 and 3 in the morning. Sometimes I’d have a panic attack, and he’d help me calm down and write a couple sentences to get me flowing, and I’d flow into my own words with those initial footholds.

In those dark hours before dawn, Dad would sit in our basement in his robe, the coffee-machine percolating upstairs, going over my paper and telling me what I needed to change and what I didn’t need to fix. Sometime’s I’d object to his editing, but he usually had a logical point to the editing, and it helped me see my writing from a different perspective.

When the paper was complete, my dad would often let me go to bed and sleep in, and he’d call me in as sick until the paper was due, or he’d let me come home early sick after turning it in so I could get some sleep. I got to get rest, but he’d get dressed in his dapper suit, put on his Polo cologne after his shower, and head to work. He’d work until 6pm, and then come home on not much more than two or three hours of sleep. He’d go to bed at the regular time, and get up and do it again.

I never really saw all of this as love or sacrifice until he was gone. I never understood how tired he must have been until I hit thirty and realized how vital sleep is the older you get. I always thought he was editing my stuff because it sucked and he was disappointed in me. I’d feel that way until I got the A-grade, and then I realized I wasn’t so bad after all, and that he was just helping me get better.

I haven’t been able to endure a college writing course because of Dad’s help. All other writing-specific teaching has been empty and boring for me; it doesn’t really challenge me like Dad did. Each time I try to take one, I find the holes in the teachers opinions and tend to drift offline. Since Dad died, the classes remind me of him, and I get overly emotional with the grief I’ve never seemed to heal. I’ve dropped out of three lower division writing courses, and intentionally received an F-grade due to an utter lack of drive in completing the one course I stuck through. I tested out on these courses with my SAT/ACT scores, but somehow colleges always find a way to squeeze the students of more bucks when it comes to core requisites.

A big part of why I am writing this blog is because of Dad. He was an exceptional poet and a great writer, and he taught me all I have really held onto in writing. He was into the wordage of what he wrote, and he’d often write with words that I had never heard of. One of Dad’s most cherished possessions was his Oxford English Dictionary. Their station in our house was in the restroom or on the table where my dad would have his coffee. I’d catch him going through it weekly, reading aloud the words to memorize their meanings. He loved the English language.

Several days after he had died, he visited me. I was crying in the bathroom, unable to get out of a bath that had diminished from hot to tepid. I had to be back in college in two days to make my Boulder rent, and I didn’t really have it in me to be a good student then. I felt his soul enter the bathroom, and heard him say, Jenny, don’t make the same mistake I did; do what you love to do, pursue your dreams, and you will be all right. You will make it if you follow your heart. You will be okay. I am so proud of you. I love you so much, I will always be here.

I can’t really explain the logic or science behind that experience, but those words have guided every choice I’ve made since then. I don’t really like institutions or science without conscience, so I stopped studying at CU and didn’t finish my degree. I don’t really enjoy a life without creation, so I started chasing the dreams I wanted to chase, like blacksmithing and drawing and writing. I’ve been living off the inheritance I got from my father’s death, and it wasn’t ever as big as some folks thought, but it was enough to let me find out what I wanted out of this life and try to myself again. Most people don’t know what they want at thirty, but I do. Most people don’t take the time to listen to their heart, but I chose to. I had to because of the hard lesson of death. I had to listen because of my dad’s sacrifice. He died after living a life to fill the needs of others, and he lost himself along the way.

So, what lesson can be gained from reading about the experience of one who has lost a parent? Remember to not sacrifice yourself for the sake of your security or your families security. Remember to grieve when you need to and not to bury it - you deserve the time you give yourself to grieve. Remember that some actions parent’s do seem like disrespect, but they are really done with loving intent, and parents haven’t really been parent’s before. Remember to choose whatever it is that fulfills your higher purposes and aims, because at the end of life, if you don’t, you will regret it with every fiber of your being.

I love you, Dad.