Wrestling Psyches in the Gemini phase

I seem to have a dual personality.  Maybe it’s in the stars. After all I’m a Gemini.  Do the gods mock me with this internal striving of tastes and desire?.  I find that I go into a self-imposed exile and spend 7 months by myself to write and illustrate.  “Working on a new project.”  Making my own decisions, and staying out of contact.  But then the other personal nature wrestles me over and pins me so that my social nature can arise.

Being a creative spirit is a painful course of life.  You rarely find anything others who understand the gift.  You are living with others in isolation of soul.  There is this clawing and scratching to find a place of connection with other humans.  A place to ride the same vibe.

The closest I’ve gotten to this type of rapport is to play music with others, though that is not a true soulful connection.  But we all can catch the groove of a great song, and that seems to patch human spirits together, ever so transiently. We get great community connected through both music and food. Though you eat the same dishes and dance to the same beat, we really have trouble keeping the thread taut. It reminds me of the two cans with the cord we used to have as kids. Never worked really well, did it.

Being a writer can come from desiring this connection so strongly that you’ll do about anything to get the communication process started. Some of us have torn souls, ripped by the indiscretions of family or an evil neighbor who soiled our childhood innocence.

We spit out words and though to make a connection. We tried this as children and were often abused for trying to bother adults with our demands for shared moments. They slapped us and belittled us when we stepped forward with our fledgling efforts to make music, write stories or color a picture. But the more we (our feelings) are trounced upon by heavy sarcasm and mean-spirited comments, we grow in hunger to connect.

It’s like living as an alien in an alien world. A Stranger in a Strange Land. Jo Walton writes this review.

We then turn intelligently defensive, and withhold out thoughts and ideas from others. Or we build unclimbable walls. We then create in isolation. But that same powerful desire to connect keeps throwing us into the painful fray in our efforts to make that singular connection. Aren’t we all still looking for approval.

I’m at a place in my personal life that I’ve gotten some balance, and my soul is stronger now. It’s time to venture out into the world of humankind again. But this time, I’ll seek the company of artists and writers, poets and screenwriters, sculptures and musicians & of course, comedians.

My First Step

I’m considering joining a writer’s group. What do you think? I live in Orange County, California, so I know there are writer’s groups here.

My first search results:

If you are like me, living in your isolation? Are you sensing it’s time to step out and meet someone? Are you a writer or illustrator, poet or painter? Have you joined a community-based group? You may want to if you would like some companionship on this road to achieving success in your passion. You may want to try out www.meeting.com. On Google Plus I searched for “Writer’s Group” and got connected. But I live in OC not LA.

The LA Writer’s Group page

 

The sting of allegory: Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings is an epic loaded with allegories laced with the strains of truth which men reject from man’s institutional religions.  In my own spiritual struggles over the last 20 years of my life, I’ve grown closer to unraveling those fibers of fiction in order to peer into my own soul.  Yet, I’m afraid that those poignant messages are lost when the uneducated masses sit before this masterpiece of film.

The first simple message is that those who seek power are crushed by it.  The hobbits, of course, want to live simple lives, not venture from their hobbit holes in the shire http://gusgo.webs.com/theshirefarm.htm , and to basically enjoy the pleasures of life, like hearth and home, the pipe, the potato and carrots.  The ring is for those who want to yield power.  The ring draws the ambitious.  Those tempted to use it, which includes even Gandalf, either succumb to it, bringing out of them their own personal darkness, or spurring them to fight off madness.

That message is the most readily visible part of the story .  It percolates throughout the whole of the three books.  Yet, in the writing, the analogy I’m more interested in is Frodo getting lost away from Sam, and caught in the webbings of the Shelob.   This relates to the spiritual condition of those who have separated from the fellowship of men.  The more people are disconnected with the body of believers, the more easily they are to become prey by the wicked.  The sicker the mind, the more one stumbles, like Froto in the lair Cirith Ungol .

There are whole classes of leeches in the world.  They are known by their own markings: Get rich schemes, pleasure purveyors, selling sex, drugs, alcohol, what will make you cool and fit in.  The tares of these temptations are venomous.  Add to that the tangles such as video games  , television shows , porn    and other entertainments that waste the productive souls of men, and you have a whole web of things to secure men from the light of truth.

The webbings aren’t deadly for Frodo, but in the story he has ventured too far into the dark to be safe.  He nearly perishes due to the perversity of Gollum  , who has tasted of and been consumed by the power of the ring.   Frodo is like us once we have wandered from friends and family who care for us.  Actually the true fellowship would be more akin to those connected to the members of a Christian body who live the commandments to love one another.  I think J. R.R. Tolkien would agree with the assumption.

The wages of sin are death, and just like the poisoned spider sting the Frodo encounters, that is how people who have given in to the darkness cause themselves harm.  The meth addict consumes their own flesh in pursuit of the pleasure of their drug.  The crack addict   too.  Each addict is not intending their own demise.  They have lost command of themselves.  The emotional turmoil inside is so painful that the willfully wash their minds with chemicals to block out the hurt.

Most of the world is so hedonistic or nihilistic that they turn their back on these warped beings.  They need to recover, but that takes the true and unquantifiable force of love – that is the picture Tolkien paints with Sam recovering Frodo, and later when he carries him up the steep slopes of mount doom.

Deeper within my psych, I have realized that the first step for people away from the love of God is for them to step outside the fellowship.  Breaking fellowship removes the unsuspected to a world of pain.  I see that in families, like my own, that once love is lost and obligation is the only tread holding a family together, that family members often hurt each other, and care little if their members wander from the path.  It is worst when the family has turned their back on faith, or with a greater fatalism have curse religion, faith and God – like the atheists do.  Where they have been wronged is that what should have been a loving center becomes a place of pain.  Everyone wants to avoid dens of inequity.

What is most amazing is that even in those dark arenas of despair God’s love can still penetrate.  But those sapped of their will power, left without true friends, for no friend feeds off another, only need to reach back to the fellowship to find comfort.  Families are often entirely inadequate for this purpose.  They are often so concerned about their resources, that they cut off the hand that reaches from within  the darkness.  Unlike the father who has the prodigal son mentioned in the bible, these families say that they will give their own sons shelter for a week, and then if they haven’t gotten a means of supporting themselves, they are out.  I heard a motherly hypocrite  recently talking about that on my bus.  My wife also spoke with a guy who had come back to visit family when he had lost his job, and they turned him out on the street, changing the locks.

Healthy families don’t kick their own when they are down.  But I suspect that before their rebellion started that their homes lacked the love necessary to help the children grow up feeling safe.  I certainly understand that personally.

So the point I’m making here is that Frodo is like anyone who has lost touch with the family of God – which is the true family.  That he needs to connect with those who love and support him.  For all of those out there who have families who only give love if the child meets some level of adequate behavior, you need to realize that that type of love is only a starvation diet.  God’s love is expressed better when people are from the fellowship.  But it takes for some to hit the bottom, to take the venom to their soul, until they are helpless, paralyzed and without support, as if they were stuck in the web, before they can realize their need, face their own shame, and give themselves to the true loving father for whom we are starving.  Everyone needs a Sam.

 

Isolation and creating mental barriers from society

I’ve been living in the world of invisible barriers, barriers erected by the fears, foolishness and foibles of mankind.  Have you?

A blind eye on dangerous mental barriers we erect.

http://www.theblogofinnocence.com/2010/04/why-is-photorealism-hugely-popular.html

I remember being in high school in a mid-sized town in Arkansas.  They had the famous segregation school issue blow up in Little Rock, and this town wasn’t far removed. I played basketball with a couple of twins.  They were on the Junior varsity team when I meet them.  They both were about my size and were quiet challenging to keep up with, but the level of competition was fun, and I thrived on competition.

Well I saw the invisible racial barriers in several ways that I had never imagined when I was there, as I decided to visit my black basketball buddies, who lived on the southern part of town.  I rode my bike down there.  I carried my basketball, with hopes to get them to play some hoops.

The reaction I received told me that they thought it extremely social awkward for the white kid to be in the black section of town; though they were quite comfortable playing at the park across from the high school in the white section of town.

Regardless, I think sports have done a great deal to improve racial relationships.  They say that the reason New England was so opposed to slavery was due to the fact that the whaling industry had developed an egalitarian philosophy: the ships would black jack men in ports to keep their crews up, all over the world (aka: shanghaiing.  Everyone, black white or other got paid the same rate of pay, and everyone was a freeman after they arrived in port.   Pitting men against the ravages of the powerful ocean, binds them together in one purpose, staying alive.  Sports also brings about this type of human connection.  Everyone on the football field bleeds red, gets knee injuries, cracked bones and concussions.  Mano de mano brings equality.  Barriers are erected to change the playing field in favor of one group over another.

I think the real barriers are set up by those in power and those with wealth.  The barriers are like a banking system, keeping the money in the hands of a few, protected from the masses.  Keeping the money in those hands is a very dirty business indeed.  The rich separate themselves from the masses though legal squirmurations (my word).  Getting out of the consequences of your actions works really well when you have money and a host of service providers wanting to support you for dough.

Today we have a man of color as president, who is well connected, and can get out of anything he wants, except for the fact that the limelight isn’t always a nice creature to deal with.  He can be eaten for lunch, like Nixon.  I doubt his foibles are going to come to light for he seems to have a real presence of mind to know how to step into the light when he wants, and not to get caught up with bad press.  If we all had our lives closely watched by the cameras, we all might life a little cleaner and meaner.  Having a dark shade of obscurity allows for people to develop their darker natures.   The more sadistic types retreat to the gloom of isolation and avoid the light altogether.

Barriers are easy to point a light into, but the dark hearts of man seem to require us to be keepers of our brothers.  If you want to live a good life, then walk out into the light, let folks into their hermitages and into the closets of their thinking.

Besides two heads are better than one.  Having more folks thinking about a topic or idea brings a realism that stands before others, if not before God.  Unlike many folks who believe freedom is keeping everything you do behind a screen of shadow and the fabric of mirage, true freedom is getting help dealing with our darkness.  That’s why confession is good for the soul.  Yes, we all have sinned against others, if not ourselves, but hiding those errors only perpetuates the behaviors.