“I long to live in the only place I truly can live.”

Well the 10 day retreat ended on Sunday morning!.   Ten days of noble silence!   Ten days of meditation.  Ten days of what might be  called “mindfulness,” meditation.

I went to the Northern California Vipassana Meditation Center,* which is just a few miles from where the devastating “Valley Fire,” near Cobb Mt. and Middletown, CA took place less than 2 months ago. For ten days I could not talk,(and if you know me, you could just imagine how interesting that was for me!) and all I could do is meditate, eat, sleep and shower, and that was all I did.  They would awaken you at 4 a.m. and you started meditating at 4:30.  The meditation ended at 9 every evening. We had about 12 hours of meditation a day. You only had fruit to eat after 12 noon every day.  It sounds so arduous doesn’t it?  Or does it sound easy?

But when you live alone, like I have for the last few years, it really isn’t that hard not to talk when you are at home.  It is when I am in the outside world that I talk or when I am on the phone.  I guess being on the computer like this would be considered talking.  You were not supposed to bring in any reading or writing utensils.  You were not supposed to use a computer or any device to communicate with the outside world.

One would think it would be hell.  But when I stood back and looked at the experience, I realize that an argument could be made that it is the life we lead that is more hell-like than the 10 days I was there.

The meditation practice would be body centered meditation if I had to define it.  You were to focus your mind on the your body.  Starting from the tip of your head and going all the way down to the tips of your toes, you were to “connect,” in my words, to the rest of your body.

Now I dont know about you, but I have spent a lifetime ignoring what my body “says” to me.  I have put layer upon layer of trauma and the effects of trauma between me and my emotional connection to my body.  I had to to survive.  I had to dissociate from the abuse by “leaving,” my body so that I could psychologically survive.  I weep as I write this.

So to tell a middle aged man, who has studied this thing called depression as best as I could in the last 5 years, that it was paying attention to your body that was going to be the thing that was going to help you heal, gave me quite a challenge.  I think I understand the dis-ease depression and have said for a while that the PTSD I suffer with is the foundation for the “mental health,” problems that I have.

So to be told that it is by paying attention to your body, for almost 12 hours a day for 10 days in silent meditation, that you were going to be able to heal in a way(s) that you could not heal before, would most probably for most people present quite a challenge.  But because one of the greatest gifts I have received on the journey was body centered breath work, I knew I had found another tool to help me.  So when I learned what the practice was, how to meditate, I was in heaven!

It was not easy.  The mind always wants to say “f— this sh–,” when presented with solutions that dont include it being the leader.  So I knew when I was learning the breathing technique that I had come to the “right,” place. I might write more about it later.   I would highly recommend it to those who suffer from “mental health,” issues.

The opening quote is something that came to me when I was at the retreat.  The answer is my body.

https://www.dhamma.org/en-US/schedules/schmanda

“To find out what is truly individual in ourselves,…”

 “… profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is.”

Okay this is going to be a rant.

I am so sick and tired of not knowing who I am and what the hell I am doing here on this thing called earth.  If the Ggods have a clue I wish they would include me in their insights.  I have just taken a day of reflection(not working) and this journey through depression SUCKS!

My friends have to live with pain, psychotic breaks, shame and fear!  I live with all of them except maybe psychotic breaks.  Why?  So I can live this life of what feels like aimless wandering from day to day, reaching and grasping for something that gives my life meaning and purpose.  What the hell is that all about?  What is so crucial for me to know about myself that I have gone into this five years of what seems to me to be, again, aimless wandering, searching for an answer to questions that I don’t even know.

“The best… work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.” I dont know if I am better at this than I was before the depression took over.  You see I live, when I am not conscious of those and what is around me, in my mind.  Not in my brain, which knows life is wonder full and awe full and the place where I dont have to live in fear. I live in a house of mirrors, that at the slightest provocation, can render me helpless and hopeless.

” I am concerned with the woes of the world and their causes, and I at least try to do something about them.”  I feel that I can help those who suffer from what are called “mental illness,” problems in life.  But I dont feel like I am doing enough to help my fellow sufferers.  I know that there are way more who suffer from this dis-ease than are in the mainstream consciousness.  I was told a while ago, by a man who is a student of AA history, that 6 out of the 20 people who wrote stories that were included in the back of the “Big Book,” of A.A. committed suicide.  Thirty percent of the original people who had “recovered from a seemingly hopeless disease,”(1) killed themselves after getting sober.

Now I see why this blog is titled the way it is.  We get sober and then we suffer from the maladies we drank over.  But back on point.  There is a part of me that wants to save every man and woman from going through what I have had to go through. It sucks.  But the dis-ease makes me not share this or step out and really take on the energy that benefits from our malaise.

Well starting tomorrow afternoon, I am off line from the outside world for 10 days.  COMPLETELY!

Hmmm, maybe that is why I wrote this angry blog.  So I would not not have to feel the fear the coming adventure brings.

123 RV, SA, JW, PH, PH, AMA!

All quotes from Carl Jung except (1) which is out of the big book of AA.  I also want to thank the Allman Brothers for playing Mountain Jam, which is what I listened to the whole time I wrote this blog.

“Reason” is, notoriously, not necessarily ethical…”

“… any more than intelligence is.” When I was practicing I called the law “The church of reason.”  I did so because the law believes it is a reasonable person standard that is the norm for behavior.  At least in criminal law it was.  I do however believe that is was all of the law that used the “reasonable person,” standard to predict what “normal” behavior was.  The underlying premise, which was never nor is it ever articulated anywhere in a treatise that everyone follows, is that someone, or a group of people can decide what is the behavior that is going to be determined to be deemed “reasonable.”

Now I dont have a problem with a large majority of what is reasonable, but when it comes to “mental health,” issues, I dont believe that those who have not suffered the debilitation that comes from Treatment Resistant Major Depressive Order(just using my own classification as a benchmark)  can create any “reasonable person” with Treatment Resistant Major Depressive Disorder to be able to articulate any sense of what predictive analysis let alone treatment they can come up with.

I will give an analogy that I think is applicable.  I have an “uncle” who is a professor of psychology at a very prestigious university.  He is a man with a Ph.D and he is renowned in his field.  However, he is not even aware that his suffering, which is not in his conscious reality, is clouding his ability to understand what and how people suffer from those deep seated, sometimes quite often forgotten emotional conflicts.  I tried one time to talk with him and hopefully get him to see that his  shadow was getting in the way of helping others who were as neurotic as he is/was.(He had a nervous facial tic that was so prevalent that he went to a doctor to get medication for it instead of seeing that it was a manifestation of his dis-ease. His weight was another issue he could not see as being related to his inner self.) But he would have nothing of it.  He let me know that he was highly educated and knew more than others did about psychology.  I said nothing because I could see that he needed to be “right,” instead of being helpful.  That is what reason can do for us.

“Clearly the anti-mythological trend is due to the difficulties we have in clinging on to our previous mythological tenets of belief.”  We hold onto reason because we have lost the ability to see that the mythical animals and other heros of worlds long ago have been replaced by one iconic hero whose life was an alegory is now seen as a literal historic event that truly took place in the exact same way that those who were “followers,” of his said  it did.

To the victor goes history.  But the iconic life of the one “true” mythical hero we espouse as being a literal life does not allow for the mythical creatures that our heros of mythological times slayed and befriended to be considered.  This takes away imagination and when it is gone, then the vacuum has to be filled with something and we now have the “reason,” of men from over 2000 years ago telling us what really happened there.  The taking away of the imagination has other effects.  People stop seeing life as a mystery that needs to be lived and see life as a journey that will hopefully get us into a place “better,” than this world.

The power of reason can allow us to strip the earth of the resources in it, since we no longer see the Ggods and Ggoddesses  as being from the earth.  Our only Ggod lives on a cloud high up in a place where we should aspire to go. But using reason, did not the Ggod we think created this thing called earth give it to us for us to glorify in this Ggods name?  Why are we then harming it and  concomitantly ourselves.

This whole one Ggod is poppycock!  Okay I apologize to all my friends who believe in “it.” It is a great myth though!

123 RV, SA, AMA, FB, HF, JW, JEW, PH, PA!

Quotes from Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488

I get so much from this blog.  I hope you can too.  http://carljungdepthpsychology.blogspot.com

” It is more trouble for us to speak really simply than to…”

” …speak in a rather complicated and roundabout way.” What is the reason that we use words in such a way as to leave a conversation less satisfied or educated than when we started.  I had a conversation with a friend the other day and in 2 minutes more was said about our lives in a true sense than was said in the previous two hours.  I am not saying that the previous two hours was anything less as far as shared communication about who we are and what we think, but in the end, the clarity that came from those two minutes was priceless for me.  Why?  Because they made it all very clear where we were in our relationship.  Wonder full!

“Only numinous experiences retain their original simplicity or oneness which still gives us intimations of the Unus Mundus.” I am sitting here this morning at 3:41 a.m. and I am struggling with the sense of what this is all about.  When this happens, the
Ggods give me the statement above in my email.  Numinous.  What does it mean.  I looked it up and the definitions included the words spiritual, religious, divine and the word that most describes how I am trying more and more to view their world as; mysterious.

I drove through the fire area again.  I had to go and see if the house of a new friend I had made was still there.   As I drove up the highway from Middletown(where the press focused it’s efforts on) to Cobb (where the conflagration really took off) I saw literally thousands of trees cut and laying off the side of the road.  There were so many that they had started moving down off the mountain and spreading them out in the open fields next to the highway.  I was awestruck by the amount of dead wood sitting by the side of the highway. (It was dawn so it was a little magical almost to see them lined up like pieces of lumber in a lumber yard)

So when I got up to the road where my friend lived, I turned up the hill and starting going up.  When I was by the road there was still houses and they seemed like they were alright.  This gave me hope as I started up the hill.  Then I saw the first burned out house.  Having driven through Middletown, I held out hope that the destruction would be random.  But as I drove further up the road, it became clear that there was no random saving of houses.  I drove by about 50 burned out houses and had to turn around.  I could not stomach to see what was above me on the mountain.  You could see the mountain from about 10 miles and almost all of the trees had been burned down.  Not the leaves burned and the trunks remaining.  No the fire up where my friend’s house used to be burned so hot that it burned the trees up and even burned the earth it was so hot.

So I turned around and sadly went back down the mountain.  I did not need to see the rubble of my friend’s house and I am glad I didn’t.  I paid an emotional price just trying to go and see his house.  I was telling my friend Willem3655 about the experience and realized how sad the whole thing is.  All you smell when you get into Middletown and all the way up the mountain to Cobb is the smell of death.  Burnt death.  Yes for the people who died, but we lost much more than that.  We lost a place where people called it home.  Cobb will not be the same for decades.  There are places where the fire was so hot, it literally burned everything in it’s wake.

That is so mysterious to me.  Why some houses and not others?  Why level a whole community like the fire did?  It makes no sense to me.  I can hear the argument that it is all random. But if there are truly Ggods out there, why pick my friend’s house and not the people a quarter of a mile away?  I have no answers just trying to make sense of such a mysterious travesty.  People who had lived on that mountain their whole lives lost everything.   A man in his 70’s who I befriended one day no longer lives where he lived for almost 50 years.  It makes no sense to me.

I believe what Campbell said, that Ggod is a metaphor for all that is beyond intellectual, it is that simple.  We dont get to make sense of the mysteries that unfold around us.

Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 508-509

123 JW, PA, PH, RV, SA, JW, JJE

The Healing.

I am not a mechanism; an assembly of various sections.
And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds deep to the soul, to the deep emotional self
and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help
And patience, and a certain difficult repentance,
Long difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself from the endless repetition of the mistake
Which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.

Written by D.H.Lawrence.  This was the first post on this blog and is being revisited for obvious reasons.

123 RV, SA, Jeanette, PA, PH, KH, JW.

A Fanatic’s Stand

I stood as tall as I could for you. Standing right by your side. Ready to defend. Ready to pounce. You asked me to embrace silence. Simply listen. Be a witness. At first I refused. I boldly declared I would not sit at the table idle while bullshit was spit in our face. While wild accusations, unfounded statements, and finger pointing were inevitable.  Family drama is a hard game to play. Honestly, I don’t feel apart of the in law family anyway. Yet, I do not want my name, my compassion for others drug through the mud.
I think perhaps my compassion and empathy were pushed aside by my ego.  His side of the family is challenging. Mental illness, rage, black and white thinking, denial, and blame run rampant. If I take a step back, that is also a day in the life of the fanatic at times.  I unconsciously packed my knee pads and shoulder pads for defensive and or offensive tackles. I was blind to this approach. My good friend had to point out to me that some in the family are sick and maybe I had the wrong hat on.  My helmet was simply designed to protect my husband as I believe he is a good man, and I hate to see him hurting at the hands of his own family.  If anything, they are unable to see how hard he tries.  But an empathetic hat could free me of needing to play hard ball.
How do you emotionally support someone else and protect yourself? This was the defining question of the trip for me.  Every year I gear up for this, prepare. I place demands on myself that I will be the supportive one. I will rise up and be the strong spouse he needs me to be.  All attention and love will be directed his way.  The negativity oozing out of buffalo is powerful. It’s so easy to get swept up into resentments, old anger, shame.  Often my husband begins to question his own worth, his place, in the midst of the chaos.  I want to swoop in and reassure him he is okay, they are the bad guys.  But, you know what I didn’t do that. I sat patiently and heard his every single word, every single sigh, every single emotion.  I was present for his struggle.
I protected myself by breathing. Being open to his pain, but not needing to embody it as well. That was the most difficult for me as I’m a very sensitive person.  The trip was somewhat tainted by this air of confusion and hurt. I also hurt internally as some things were said about me that assaulted my character.  I was shut down during a heated conversation.  I sometimes was the brunt of frustration.  But my love for my husband and my belief in him never wavered.  I continued to stand tall.
As I arrive back home to the safety of my surroundings I feel my own emotions bubbling. I am tired. In need of some self care. Maybe in need of a good cry.  I think I can look in the mirror and say I was the strong supportive wife I had hoped to be. I said few words, but my presence was powerful.  I held his hand,as he always holds mine, when he needed it most.
I’m not stroking my own ego as I write this.  In my mind it’s my “duty” to support my husband. It’s just in reality, sometimes I can’t be present. Sometimes I have no strength.  Sometimes I am lost in the mire and unable to support myself.  I guess I am trying to acknowledge there are also times bipolar has got nothing on me.

123 RV, RW, JZ, PA, SA, Dwight, Virgil, Tom S, and all the “Dogs,” in Sac!

Pointy boy is also a guardian of the blog.  He guards our ability to have fun here! Thank you Ajaytao.

“Recognizing the shadow is what I call the apprentice piece,…”

It is extremely difficult and definitely not supported by my culture to openly discuss and dredge up those deep seated emotional conflicts that persist below the level of our conscious that created violent twists to our behavior and altered our lives for the worse.

As an example, I will just say that being asked when I was 8 and was crying about MLK being shot, “when are you going to grow up?” by my Dad created such a conflict in me and has tremendous power over me today when am not conscious.  So, right then, consciously and as well more strongly, unconsciously, I decided that I could not act out my emotions.  I had to act grown up to be considered normal and be loved by my father.*

Now being grown up at 8 is a wonderful concept, but virtually impossible emotionally as far as I am concerned.  But damn if I was not going to get my father’s approval.  So I started acting as if. When Bobby Kennedy was shot a few months later,  I was devastated. I mean crushed.*  But I knew that I could not show it when my Dad came home…and I didn’t. Isolated and without any context and any lack of depth of character and I would argue soul, the event of that day, when MLK was shot, effected my life from then on a very significant way.

“… but making out with the anima is the masterpiece which not many can bring off.” Because when MLK was shot, I was told that my acting in sadness, empathy and a sense of woundedness of that part of me that really was expressive and open with my emotions was wrong.  Men did not show emotions like that because it made us look weak.  As I sit and write this a tremendous sense of deep sadness and pain washed over me.  Me having to become this stoic rational self led me into law, which I call the “church of reason,” because emotions and empathy have no place in the law.

No wonder I almost died by being an attorney.  I was trying like hell to honor my father’s haunting emotional deprivation and live like him.  I write all of this to say that I feel more today than I ever.  Please dont think that I am talking about being happier, which I have to say I am finding more and more joy in my life..  I am talking about feeling my pain, sadness, joy, empathy and more acceptance of life being a challenging journey through the effects of the PTSD I have had to harbor in my body for my whole life.

It also mean that I get to experience many of those emotional conflicts at a “different,” and “deeper,” level.  But by doing so, I am able to live life and yes, it is amazing that the next few words are going to come out of my mouth, and love those who are in my life with a level of caring that I did not believe I had in me any longer.

Coming full circle to that eight year old boy who was crushed when MLK was shot is a gift I have always held onto as a part of me that was beautiful is a wonder full thing.  In the moment it does not feel very “good,” but I would not trade a moment for this experience, even as tears roll down my cheeks.

123 Steve, Rhonda, Renee, Tom S, Tom L, Pat, Jeff V, Jerry M, Ed P, Colonel, the Painter and especially my dear friend the Leprechaun!

*That is me in the picture to the right  I am in the front left of the photograph.  I could not have been more than 9 in the picture as that is my little sister who is eight years younger than me.  I would be smoking pot on a regular basis within 1 to 2 years!!!!!

**  Now it is not hard to see why it crushed me so.  Some man, an adult figure in my life, albeit only through the medium of television, was talking about loving and being kind and was more than anything exhibiting it. As an 8 year old boy, I saw a man who was trying to help the world be a better place, and this was the antithesis of what I was living under as far as what a male role model should be.

  In case you didn’t meet Baron, please meet Baron.  He is the guardian of this blog and of all of those who suffer. He seems so loving and kind in the picture, doesn’t he?

Quote  from Carl Jung– Letters Vol. II, Page 481

“The mind cannot establish or assert anything beyond itself.”

What is the reason that I can’t understand this simple principle. What is the reason that I can’t understand that my mind is not as big as it thinks it. Is it not insanity for me to believe that because my mind says I am not worthy, that I am not worthy.  You see one of the biggest fallacies I believe, yes I believe, is that my mind is my brain.  Wow, is that the biggest joke since…well since I believed that people were actually going to be nice and loving and kind in the world. I was disabused of this hopeful and loving way of life by my grandfather early on.  He used to love to come  to our house when I was a young boy and tease us until we cried and then laugh at us for crying.  Please, dont feel sorry for me, because that is just an image about the ghost that I have made him into.  However, when I was 8 years old and all the men of my family, my Dad and two uncles and I were riding in the Hearst to bury Grandpa and they were all crying.  I said out loud,  “why is everyone crying for Grandpa?  He was mean and not a very nice man”  Needless to say that did not go over well, because you dont say anything “disrepectful,” about the dead.  As an aside, where the hell did that myth come from, that you dont say anything disrespectful about someone who is dead?  If that is true, then why do still look at Hitler as the genocidal maniac he was.  Shouldn’t we just forgive and forget?   Can anyone answer that historically. I am afraid that I know where it came from, but dont want to make that argument unless I know it for sure.

“You are more than what you think you are.”  [1] I find that when I engage fully with other people from a depth psychological perspective that I truly am expressing Who I am and more than anything else is I am not trying to express my “self.” I was engaged in a wonderful conversation with a friend yesterday and there came a point in our conversation when I wanted to give them “the right answer.” Yet I knew that if I did I would do nothing more than subjecting them to my interpretation of their reality. I was going to make them see them my mind was able to know more than their’s did about their own problems.

“Psychology has no self-help manual for its own affliction.”[1]  I am seeing a favorite site in depth psychology turning into a commercial site.  I wont say which one, you might know Deb, and it saddens me.  You see I see depth psychology as one of the major vehicles which can assist people into a level of healing that is unattainable through the other modalities of therapy.  Why, because it allows a person to go within themselves and learn about their true Self.  Then when I see the site I believe had/has the best chance in doing that become commercialized, it saddens me.

“Let the flame of anger free you of all falsity.”  After I read what I just wrote, I have to tell the truth and say, it angers me that my favorite depth psychology site is become commercialized.  Many people, Hillman, Woodman and others have made it their life’s journey to try and help heal the world.  Now some person or other persons has made it about money. Why cant healing the world be enough.  I would trade all the money in the world if people could not have to live in fear.  For them to have “High Hopes,” as Bruuuce says.

Title quote by Carl Jung [1] James Hillman[2]John O’Donohue

“I wish somebody could be found who would…”

“…set the inner and outer data of this life in order and interpret it with the necessary psychological understanding.” When I set out to write on this site, all I wanted was relief from depression.  I had already been lead to my ideological mentor, James Hillman, and renewed my wonder full relationship with Joseph Campbell’s work.  I was learning about Jung and met wonder full people here.*

I read this Jung quote the other day and see countless examples of the lack of any sort of order and “necessary psychological understanding,” that is manifest in my world in particular and in the interactions and observations with others.  This causes me consternation when I think that the dis-ease in the world is so rampant that we are sliding down a rabbit hole that we will not be able to get out of.  Many would say that the environment is already that precarious.

“If you are all alone then it is because you isolate yourself; if you are humble enough you are never alone.” But then I read this and I realize that the basis of the almost hopelessness that is deep seated and comes from an unconscious place  is usually one of my own mind’s making. Because I decide that I know the worlds problems so well that I understand the gravity of the situation.  Yet if I continue that thought process out to the next level, I realize that  I am doing nothing more than projecting my own dis ease out onto the rest of the world.  Although many projections would be correct, my dis–ease would still make much of the analysis skewed and possibly incorrect.

But to take the quote above to a collective place, more and more I hear, from friends and others that we are more and more living these isolated lives.  I am so grateful that I have my “meetings,” and peers from there, because if left to my own devices, I would tend to go towards isolation.

To me there is a difference between isolation and introversion.  I truly think there is a part of me that is introverted, but I can and during the depths of my depression become isolated so bad, that it took my dear friend the Painter to come and get me and tell me that I had to go to the meeting with him.  I would resist, even become angry and defiant, to try and not go with him, but I would always go.

Does that mean I am not humble? I would posit that Jung may have been referring to being humble possibly mean being open to listening to other’s ideas.  Terrence Real said that the “only way out of covert depression is overt depression.?  I may have taken it too literally, but I could not help being in the catatonic state I was in for over 4 years.  No one in their right mind would choose to have their lives destroyed and there be a nothingness to their lives like I did.  My dear friend willem3655 would not choose to be where he is today.  There is too much evidence of the contrary by his material possessions and when he is not in the throes of his dis-ease, a joviality and light hearted-ness that he has.

I am left at the end of this post still wishing that there was someone who could “set the inner and outer data of this life in order and interpret it with the necessary psychological understanding.”  I guess I will keep trying to find out answers to this journey and struggle we call life.

123 RV, RW, JZ, SA, PA, JM, TS, TL, Virgil, Dwight and the rest of the “Rebellion Dogs.”

Quotes from Carl Jung

• like Ptero9, Ajaytoa, Radiating Blossom, Soul Gatherings, Therese Borchard, Beyond Meds, and Symbol Reader, just to name a few.

“These days I spend my time skipping through the dark…”

I was talking with my good friend the other day.   I told him that I didnt know if I was sliding down the rabbit hole or climbing to the mountain by the decisions I had recently made in my life.  You see the one and only thing depression has taken from me and my life is the power to believe in my Self.  I had lost the ability to trust the inner wisdom that saved my life when I was a child by teaching me how to dissociate to survive.  Well it all felt okay, just okay, as I believe I am getting better, until I woke up from a nap about an hour and a half ago.  Now it feels like I am sliding down, down and down into that deep and extremely dark abyss called depression.  Not just a little sadness, but that feeling when I woke up was that I just wished I was dead, that the psychic pain was just too much to bear any longer.  I am very aware of the triggers that have caused this to happen in the last few days. I will discuss just a few.

I had a particular decision that was extremely disturbing for me recently.  I had bought some materials, that I am going to use in my endeavor to save my soul by being creative again for the first time in over five years.  When they arrived, they were not delivered the way I had anticipated they would be and this disturbed me greatly.  I communicated with the supplier and he was solving my problem but before the problem could be addressed, the “Valley Fire,”* broke out about 3 to 4 miles to the east of me.  So I had to wait 8 days before I could get back into the property because of the fire. So this distressed me more than I even knew until this afternoon.  I realize now that the 8 days were pretty intense.  So yesterday the problem was solved and I started the project.  I am scared to do it, but I have a deep seated feeling that if I dont, then I will do what my Dad did.  You see my Dad died a long time before he died and that is what scares me more than anything. So I was delayed in my journey to salvation by the most scary thing I have ever seen in my life, the Valley Fire, by events that I had no control over.

“…We all come up a little short and we go down hard…”  Another thing that is happening is my dear, dear friend the Leprechaun is dying.  When I first met him, he was my guide into this hell called trauma carried by the body and hidden from reality by the mind.  I call it shame.  Well a couple of months ago, he said to me,  “I want to heal my shame before I die” Now if you are in mid life it might seem like an easily obtainable goal.  But when you are in your 90’s and your body is shutting down in front of you, it is not such an easy thing to do.

When he said that to me my heart hurt.  The pain I felt was as powerful as anything I had felt in a long time.  When I become the teacher and the Leprechaun became the student, something happened.  A part of me died that day for him.  But I told him that I would walk all the way through it with him.  We have been working very hard on his healing for the last few months.  But today, I could see that his body was not well.  The reasons for it are not important.  What was important was that my dear teacher, who was now the student, was withering away slowly in form and there was nothing I could do about it. Seeing a person who you love as much as you have ever loved in your life dying before your very eyes is brutally real and painful.

“…Now pray for yourself that you may not fall, when the hour of deliverance comes on us all,…” I spent last night at a concert and was with great company.  But when I was there, the always ready to pounce on me shame came into play and damn did it rear it’s ugly head.  I worked through it and was able to stay present pretty damn well, if I so say myself.  But like that constant thread called fear that is present at some level in my existence endlessly, sleep brought the shame back with a brutal vengance today.

“When our hope and faith and courage and trust, can rise or vanish like dust into dust.”  Depression is about the lack of faith and trust because when I dont have those two things I have no courage. When I dont have courage, I cant take care of even my basic needs in life.  Life then becomes the worst thing it can ever be, a living hell.
“There’s a kingdom of love waiting to be reclaimed.” Then today a friend told me that she did not think she could live without seeing her child.  She said that her daughter was her “breath.”  That tore me up and I mean it tore me up for a long time.  I sat in my car outside the Leprechaun’s house and cried for 10 minutes trying to respond to the friend who talked about her daughter being her “breath.”  I stayed outside the Leprechaun’s house and cried because I go and visit the Leprechaun to help him heal.  He has given me so much and I feel it is my duty and my honor to give to him in the ways that he gave to me.    But to be honest, within five minutes of me being there, I was crying again.  Not just tears running down my face, but gut wrenching, full body sobbing.  Wailing and dying to be relieved of that pain.**
“…I am the hunter of invisible game.” So I come full circle here hopefully. I wandered the last five years or so in the darkness that I would not wish upon my worst enemy.  But I know that I have to be vigilant in my trust and faith.  Today when I woke up, it was gone.  But at the end of this writing, I feel a little glimmer of courage.  Yes it is less than it was before I went to sleep, but shit, after what I have been through and where I have been in the last five years, it is a mountain more than it was just that short time ago.

123-RV, HK, PA, SA, PH, TS, and yes you JW!

* The Valley Fire is/was a fire that started about 4 to 5 miles east of where I was near Loch Lomond, California on Saturday September 12, 2015 at 1:24 p.m.  The pictures in this post come from me taking them with my phone, as I am driving to get back home that day and I was hurrying to get out of the area. They are not in focus, but these are the images I was seeing that day. The fire did not come towards where I was, however I got within 1 to 2 miles of the fire about 45 minutes after it started.  I have never, ever, ever seen the smoke from a fire rolling into the sky like I saw it  that day.  I saw the devil that day when I was at the Loch Lomond store.  I saw death in a way I hope I never see again.

**  I dont talk about my relationship with my daughter here, as it is important to talk about my feelings about the situation, not her reality or mine in relation to her or our relationship.

All quotes from Bruce Springsteen’s The Hunter of Invisible Game. A wonder full metaphorical video is linked below.