Winter-time Blues

Would it sound strange if I were to say that what you described is how a majority of us "make it through?"--if we were honest about it.

That is, if we were honest enough to take off our masks and be courageous enough to tell the secrets we know to be true to ourselves and to those we can trust those secrets to.

In my opinion nothing of which I hear you saying here is a "down-er." If anything, at least for me, it's a flesh and bone telling of what it means to be fully human in a some times dark and sometimes lonely "place."

If anything I count it honest-- what, I think, Derek Walcott describes as Love after Love:

The time will come
when with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at our own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the others welcome,

and say sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

All your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

The photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.


When I stumbled across the words of this poem they became my way also of speaking into the cold dark night a golden and kind word too absurd perhaps to be anything but true, the laughter, the celebration of things beyond the tears of things!

saner

Saner, you are the best. Posting this was a venture in vulnerability. I've spent far too many years, trying to hide the real "me" from the masses. Am learning that putting this stuff out in the open does help. That's a great poem, BTW.

Rumi said, "Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold you own myth."-- (the over arching truth of your own life).
"Everyone has a fascinating story to tell, an autobiographical myth. And when we tell our stories to one another, we, at one and the same time, find the meaning of our lives and are healed form our isolation and loneliness.
Strange as it may seem, self-knowledge begins with self-revelation. We don't know who we are until we hear ourselves speaking the drama of our lives to someone we trust to listen with an open mind and heart." Sam Keen
This approach has worked well for me in overcoming loneliness, developing compassion, and creating community.
I have found compassion and community in the strangest places! I'll meet someone on a airplane or at a seminar or at work and I will "venture vulnerability." And when I'm luck, or fortunate my reality is transformed.
I understand things about myself I never could have known with out these kinds of relationship! I take away from these encounters a friendship, a "knowing" I never would have experienced without the "venture!" I'm born into a wider network, a wider community of consciousness!
I have been fabulously fortunate in that I meet people full of wisdom and depth that help me understand that if we do not make the effort to become conscious of our personal myths gradually, we can become dominated by all sorts of nasty psychological routines, scripts, games.
In my opinion to remain vibrant throughout a lifetime we must always be inventing ourselves, weaving new themes into our life-narratives remembering the past, ready to experience the "already," re-visioning our future, reauthorizing the truth by which we live.

I'm thankful that our paths have crossed! Nothing less than enrichment can come from us having shared our stories of what it means to be truly human and alive!
saner