This entry has been a long time coming and will be a rambling mesh of disjointed thoughts, self-therapy really, and probably not wisely meant for public consumption, but every so often I find myself losing my focus, or rather , my emotional confidence, and that generally means that I have neglected something deep within me, something personal or spiritual which I have to retouch-or purge-in order that I may get back to my normally positive outlook. Being of a solitary nature, I recharge myself in solitude rather than society, so when I neglect solitude..that is, the Good, Reflective, Primal, Prayerful solitude, for too long- and the writing which often accompanies it- my sense of self suffers. I start to lose ME...and that must never happen, for with it all my intuitive confidence and self worth start to be questioned by over analysis, or timidity, rather than simply being who and whatever I am in the moment.
Such moods do not diminish immediately,and I suppose have a few pressure points which set them off and which then fester awhile before I am ready to confront the hard emotions at their core. At any rate, I have not really written from my soul for over a month -until a few days ago- and this is my raw journal entry from that day, July 7th:
" Solitude. How rare in body, how elusive in mind! To take the time to think. To feel. To be! ...Beth, Mother, Chelsee, my Family, Work, Sleep. My life is not my own again-willingly-and becomes a bit off kilter some hours. Not for lack of solitude, rather for my best use of that solitude. That is, my Prayers are lacking. My discipline. My confidence. Without Proper solitude, I lose Me...I lose my core. My faith. My soul. And I have neglected me too long like the fool I am sometimes. So I walk today determined to balance the uncertainty that threatens to creep into me. And to purge vestiges of my former lives that ended badly yet carry their debris into this one. To write from the heart if I still remember how. Hell! It has been too long. It has been forever it seems. Not by the calender but by everything I have disused or forgotten. Words? What are they? Pieces of things I thought mattered once..that Did matter...profoundly..foolishly..necessarily..like nothing else I have ever known. Decades of words as meaningless as flowers on my fathers grave. They are gone like figments of my imagination. It is the old Buddhist wisdom all over again-Nothing survives so long as the illusion of what we expected it to be. Let one go and another replaces it to carry us on to death. Of course. How could it be otherwise? It is all we can do to stay sane in an insane world and not worry over it."
In the past weeks I have watched my niece mourn the unexpected stillborn death of her infant son-killed it seems by a taxoplasmosis bacterium which she easily resisted. Nine months of dreams gone in minutes, and a family trying to make sense of it. And me looking beyond them to so many others here in town and around the world suffering problems and tragedies I cannot conceive of. Larger lessons learned I remind myself, while forgetting my own.
Today I walked the dog into the mountains and screamed that primal rage against myself and the world-that anger that has men drinking themselves to death and killing one another like sub human rats lost in their cesspool of pain. The amygdala and hypothalamus rule our prefrontal cortex more than we admit some hours- we who do anything rather than look in the mirror at the flawed beings we are. I scream at the trees in such hours, and reset the balance within me the best I can. Nature is my church more than the pews of mankind. All the world is home to this personal God I know, which most of all demands my sober attention to the best parts of myself. It is my neglect of those parts that drives me to these words in the first place-to find the self love I call my own, without judgment or analysis, implied or self created, and enjoy the moment again, so that I may share it with others
