Stepping into the Same River

Nietzsche's Superman, the poet's humanness and active feeling, the charisma of Kesey, the long Judaic wait for the messiah, the return of Arthur, the return of Quetzoquatl, the Kwisatz Hadderach, Jung's theory of individuation, Buddhist concepts of mindfulness, Campbell's portrayal of the hero-quest we are all on--- these have fed my character lust. For you and for those after us I have wanted to be a human being. Everywhere I go I see falseness mixed in with divinity. To cultivate the giant tree takes effort, care, dedication, allowance, and stubborn belief in what one feels, in-the-gut, is right.

Twenty-six years old I'm in my pajamas before a screen in the morning writing to a small selection of people, figuring that maybe if I elevate myself out of my self-imposed chains that I will have a greater impact on the world.

Yesterday a woman came into my place of work. She had been in before. Like some medicine woman crazy in the dark forest her eyes seemed to hide under hat. She knows angles so well that your eyes never meet hers unless she chooses to let them graze you or if you decide to force the issue. She dresses like someone who has been on the road and needs to stay warm. A refugee from the sixties without some of the accommodating warmth I like to associate with the era. To the chagrin of my bosses she totes a large black backpack into the store and never buys anything. Instead she walks around and looks at things, handling them, reading them, perusing the aisles, lifting things and putting them back on the shelves. I return continually to a Muriel Rukeyser poem as a prayer of sorts:

In the body’s ghetto
never to go despising the asshole
nor the useful shit that is our clean clue
to what we need. Never to despise
the clitoris in her last speech.

Never to despise in myself what I have been taught
to despise. Nor to despise the other.
Not to despise the it. To make this relation
with the it : to know that I am it.

"To know that I am it." All of my anger, my frustration, my longing, my want to stop a person and reach out to them and say, "How can I help?" is a lot of hogwash if I don't let myself change inside. It's not about sensing all the time, it's about accepting knowledge as wisdom. We have to let ourselves know some of the important ideas or we're just wasting our potential. Should one settle, identifying with scraps of other or delve further into the mystery? To me the answer is simple.

I call bullshit when people say, "You don't know racism" as if I could have no clue. I have been oppressed motherfuckers. I have worn the mantle of needless shame. I've been interrogated, overlooked, desecrated, betrayed. We have all been oppressed even if we weren't paying any attention.

I see this woman come into the store and I try to think her mystery. If there is anything I fail to do enough of, I don't dream into your mysteries enough my friends. Self-concern with the subjective 'I' is a common plague. One that rings shallow through the annals of history, one that also rings with atomic bombs and petty disputes turned into massacres of blood and shit and neighbor turning on neighbor turning on neighboring country turning on country across the ocean turning on the natural conditions that allowed life to occur in the first place. The personal is always transpersonal even if people aren't always good at listening or translating for themselves.

What I'm trying to say is... I've been a little like an Ayn Rand character too wrapped up in my own happinesses or unhapinesses to share well in the happinesses of those I love. For all my ability to express I don't express well. When Rebecca says to me, "I want security." I understand her hesitation regarding a potential relationship to me. I live far away, I "make (her) feel like she has to be more conscious around (me)", I burn inside but that burning is what gives me a strong measure of peace.

Something wild broke into me after Rachael. Rachael was scared around me after the break-up, after she obliterated me. In a sense she was looking at her own picture of Dorian Gray, as I repeated the horrible things she did and said to me back at her in my voice of agony. I don't expect people to be strong enough to accept what they fear. Cold comfort, false serenity : the order of the day. The ecstatic simple life is not contrary to complex aspects of life.

Forgive me for launching straight into romantic drama in this blog arena. I'm sorting something out that is hugely important to me. Reclamation project #1 is getting my life back together. That means finding the right paths. That means reconnecting with friends. That means dealing appropriately with romance, never an easy thing to do. (sigh)

Consider the title of this entry. The old Heraclitus quote goes, "You can never step into the same river twice." Brilliant in its irony. Of course we step into the "same" river, the river has the same name, the familiar setting fills our senses if we come back to it in a decent amount of time, it's near our town, down the same trail. Change is the one constant tho, we return years later with nostalgia thick in our eyes and the river is not the same. Our memory has tainted it, our psychological associations have transformed, floods have moved the banks, the island in the fork has eroded, even the echoing sounds of the birds seem foreign as if the acoustics are incredibly different even tho the treestand nearby hasn't been cleared.

Every situation is what it is, and is what it is is not. This conundrum is not worth exhausting. Conditions change and we must not expect them to be the same. I can laugh now at the idea that Rebecca may have been swayed by my verbalization of wanting an "open relationship". Hell, Rachael devastated me with how she brought up the idea. The idea itself wasn't abhorrent to me (altho I didn't like it very much) it was how she communicated with me that drove the stake into my heart. I have not been open with Rebecca even when I've talked a flood. I am scared shitless by what I feel. By open I meant that I didn't want her to feel chained to me. In the extremely odd chance that I would meet someone else who blew me away I wanted to be able to tell her and go through the process of figuring out what we should do. If she hadn't decided on somebody else already I'd take all these issues up with her. I guess it was close tho, she was "tempted" by me and had "thought about it a lot" and "wanted to hold my hand."

Someday I'll make a woman very happy, happy in ways she never dreamed of. In the meantime, I'm going to figure out how to communicate well enough so that girls don't misunderstand my intentions. I'm going to figure out how to communicate so that my loved ones know that they are loved and that future generations may have a chance to enjoy such happy circumstances.