Love is like a faucet - it turns off and on
About halfway through writing this I finally realized Billie Holiday had the best quote for this stretch of writing:
I haven't thought of the title for this yet, but I imagine Peter Gabriel covered this in his Us album somewhere so when I can think of the right lyric to cover this it will show up there. Last week I talked about my past quite extensively - and maybe the reason I am so stuck upon it is I see the connection between my past and present life quite often, especially when I am going through yet another emotional storm - as these storms seem to come and go like the ones in the physical environment. I wasn't even sure about writing about this here as it is pretty personal, but I have to write about it somewhere, so it might as well be here.
Right now I am reading a pretty interesting book by Deepak Chokra called Life After Death. I have leaned toward believing something lies after our passing, but obviously I can't prove it one way or the other - and his citing of near death experiences does not prove anything necessarily either, but also re-reading Ram Dass - a book called The Only Dance There Is - both books talk about karma - and I have touched on it before. I think particularly if you have gone through a troubling experience - one that continues to occur in my case as the result of a past one, than accepting karma makes it a smoother pass than falling into the angry victim path.
This all falls upon my belief that I have altered between two extremes - on the one side of love, nourishment, and acceptance - on the other side between hatred, emotional starvation, and rejection. In my life the way I chose to deal with them has been in three phases - the first - in my childhood - the "comfortably numb" (thanks to Roger Waters) approach - tuning it out - not really accepting what was happening and living in an empty spiritual void. The second - when my emotions finally had to balance things out, to go to a bi-polar extreme - one of feelings of great despair to the point of wanting to end my life, but on the opposite extreme - realizing there was a whole world of spiritual wonder to be experienced, that I never knew about until I got high on my own brain's malfunction. I think drugs like marijuana and then finally psychedelic mushrooms may have paved the way for that high, but I think that experience brought me to see that if I could get there - in a slightly more toned down version, I could experience the world as a spiritual magic type of place instead of a spiritual lacking void. At the same time I experienced the "mania" - not a word that I like much, but that's what people called it - I tapped into a huge vast unexplored world of anger - which is why my parents changed the locks on the doors. I was never a physical threat to anyone, as even in my angriest state I did a lot more screaming than hitting - but it was clear that my psyche was finally catching up with what it perceived to be a pretty unjust state of affairs - mainly that there is only so much emotional abuse, humiliation, taunting and hatred one can be exposed to before finally something extreme is going to happen.
So phase two - so to speak - was one where doors were opened, in that I could see a place I could be where I could know some concept of "God" on a pretty personal level - as that can happen when you are convinced that you are an Estimated Prophet (thanks Mr. Weir) living out the full extent of that song. So in this place where my doors were opened, I knew a place of holiness and extreme anger - both at the same time. 20 years is a long time to be angry without even knowing how angry you are, and even though it erupted in a volcano I stayed angry for a long time even after my neurotransmitters settled down a bit. So after I had a crush on a sweet young lady at my job, that turned obsessive and then erupted into further emotions where I went from feeling in love with her to hating her guts, well - that anger cycle stayed on - and after I went into the mandatory therapy required by my company, my shrink then convinced me that my parents were the most evil, horrific people in existence - and then I really felt angry at them - because they were the ones who had done this to me.
So - at phase three here - I can't tell you my anger is gone - I raised my voice at home the other day after a long trip - I can say I was tired - exhausted - I can come up with excuses, but ultimately it is on me - my anger has diminished, I try to do all I can to live in a state where it does not consume me - and on paper - I know it is only a fraction of what it once was. Part of this is thanks to therapy, part of it due to all the eastern books I have read - including an excellent one I already cited by Thich Nhat Hanh about Cooling The Flames - but I am delusional if I ever think it will ever entirely leave me - and the reality is once in a while I probably am going to blow up. Hopefully it will happen less and less, for a shorter and shorter time, but my anger is a part of who I am - it has gone from suppressed, to out of control, to finally an occasional erupting.
But this actually was not meant to be just about anger - which is a part of the equation - but more my alternating between love and rejection - because I know on some level that this lifelong search for love is the center of my karma. In my relationships - all of them - and of course that goes without saying that my marriage is my longest and most important - I have experienced both extremes, and the pendulum swings back between one and the other. So I can cry victim, I can talk crap about my wife and how evil she is and everything is wrong that she does, or I can realize that on a karmic level - I chose her to live out this alternating set of extremes, and if it was not here it would be somewhere else. That notion of an elusive mate who will love you all the time, take care of every need and desire of yours - hell - I bet if she was out there, I wouldn't know what to do with her. Early on in my relationship with my wife, when the pattern was starting to unfold - I realized there was a bit of a deja-vu here - that she was reminding me of every relationship I had experienced that had failed - and I on some level - when I was trying to track her down at Balboa Park for a meeting that had gone all wrong - this must have been in the summer of 1996 when I first started dating her - I realized that if I didn't face it with her, it was going to be with someone else - so why fight it and instead just take it where it was going to take me.
So - 11 years later - almost now - here we are. We have had some wonderful times together - when it is going good with her, I sometimes feel like I have died and gone to heaven and can't believe how well I have it. And of course, when things are not going so well - well - you can put two and two together. At this point in our lives, with both of our hormones going south - hers approaching menopause, mine approaching "manopause" - a phrase coined in the paper, and then the stress of a child who has symptoms that keep her from sleeping and going to school, the long search for treatment - the setting puts a ton of pressure on us. We have cultural differences, differences of where we want to live, we have the predictable conflicts about physical intimacy - we have come to a truce in the past regarding a lot of these, but at this point in life - it is pretty tense, I am sure the notion of separation and divorce starts to float out there once again - and really who knows what will happen. I am not a fortune teller. I know 11 years into the longest relationship I have ever been in, I can see why people have affairs, I can see why half of the people get divorced, I can see why for the other half that sticking it out is sometimes the most difficult task anyone can deal with. Ironically enough we turn to marriage for love and companionship, but in the end I think it can only last if you know how to survive on your own and find a way to meet your own needs so that you are not imposing them upon another individual.
So - the opposite end of the pendulum - the one I am obviously experiencing now, brings me back to my life task - the one I have experienced from birth - and that is to find within myself that which a human being can never provide me with. Although I have no subscribed religion, the notion of a Goddess figure - is kind of my do it yourself approach to dealing with this, borrowed somewhat from Pagan and Wiccan religions, but I am not really into the spells and potions and all the stuff that goes with it. It is my task to find the love I am seeking in my own spirituality - that has to come first - before it can be physically lived out. Hell - my poor wife is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, she has issues and tasks of her own, she is isolated, exhausted, hurt and how can I expect her to be my saviour. Right now she has to be where she is, and I have to be where I am and it feels like two people living alone in the same house. Maybe it will get better, maybe it will get worse - maybe it will just stay the same - but this is what it has to be and this has been what I have chosen on some level - my karmic choice, my destiny. I know for myself running away from this is not the answer - after all - "there really isn't very far to go" as a wise Hunter once said.
So - here I am - it ain't easy - it is sad, but life goes on. The mountains are still beautiful, the sky is still blue, I still wake up and life happens - there are people to meet and deal with, dogs to walk, songs to hear, and music to play.
So the lyrics I just wrote a couple days ago - will finish this post - just have now uploaded (link here): My space the video - as this entire post is kind of a lead up to the ideas expressed below:
My Sweet Love
Come now too me my sweet love
Nurturing love, beautiful love
Open up your loving sensual arms
Massage me with them, caress me with them
You know how much I'm hurting now my love
I've sought you out in others who couldn't provide you, my love
Heal this broken bleeding heart my love
Let me float inside your belly - my sweet love
Come now too me my sweet love
Unconditional love, all accepting love
Take me just the way that I am
Don't ask me to change, or even to explain - my love
You know how much I need you now my love
Appear to me this moment, right now - love
Fill my heart with soothing, calming medicine
Let me merge together with you my love
Be now here with me my love
Fill my lips with the sweetest, soothing kiss
Come and cry with me my love
Let our pain become one, our souls - become one
Now's the time to hold each other love
And to drown out all our sorrows in our love
Please don't ever leave me my sweet love
Come to me love, be with me now my love
Hold me now forever my sweet love
I haven't thought of the title for this yet, but I imagine Peter Gabriel covered this in his Us album somewhere so when I can think of the right lyric to cover this it will show up there. Last week I talked about my past quite extensively - and maybe the reason I am so stuck upon it is I see the connection between my past and present life quite often, especially when I am going through yet another emotional storm - as these storms seem to come and go like the ones in the physical environment. I wasn't even sure about writing about this here as it is pretty personal, but I have to write about it somewhere, so it might as well be here.
Right now I am reading a pretty interesting book by Deepak Chokra called Life After Death. I have leaned toward believing something lies after our passing, but obviously I can't prove it one way or the other - and his citing of near death experiences does not prove anything necessarily either, but also re-reading Ram Dass - a book called The Only Dance There Is - both books talk about karma - and I have touched on it before. I think particularly if you have gone through a troubling experience - one that continues to occur in my case as the result of a past one, than accepting karma makes it a smoother pass than falling into the angry victim path.
This all falls upon my belief that I have altered between two extremes - on the one side of love, nourishment, and acceptance - on the other side between hatred, emotional starvation, and rejection. In my life the way I chose to deal with them has been in three phases - the first - in my childhood - the "comfortably numb" (thanks to Roger Waters) approach - tuning it out - not really accepting what was happening and living in an empty spiritual void. The second - when my emotions finally had to balance things out, to go to a bi-polar extreme - one of feelings of great despair to the point of wanting to end my life, but on the opposite extreme - realizing there was a whole world of spiritual wonder to be experienced, that I never knew about until I got high on my own brain's malfunction. I think drugs like marijuana and then finally psychedelic mushrooms may have paved the way for that high, but I think that experience brought me to see that if I could get there - in a slightly more toned down version, I could experience the world as a spiritual magic type of place instead of a spiritual lacking void. At the same time I experienced the "mania" - not a word that I like much, but that's what people called it - I tapped into a huge vast unexplored world of anger - which is why my parents changed the locks on the doors. I was never a physical threat to anyone, as even in my angriest state I did a lot more screaming than hitting - but it was clear that my psyche was finally catching up with what it perceived to be a pretty unjust state of affairs - mainly that there is only so much emotional abuse, humiliation, taunting and hatred one can be exposed to before finally something extreme is going to happen.
So phase two - so to speak - was one where doors were opened, in that I could see a place I could be where I could know some concept of "God" on a pretty personal level - as that can happen when you are convinced that you are an Estimated Prophet (thanks Mr. Weir) living out the full extent of that song. So in this place where my doors were opened, I knew a place of holiness and extreme anger - both at the same time. 20 years is a long time to be angry without even knowing how angry you are, and even though it erupted in a volcano I stayed angry for a long time even after my neurotransmitters settled down a bit. So after I had a crush on a sweet young lady at my job, that turned obsessive and then erupted into further emotions where I went from feeling in love with her to hating her guts, well - that anger cycle stayed on - and after I went into the mandatory therapy required by my company, my shrink then convinced me that my parents were the most evil, horrific people in existence - and then I really felt angry at them - because they were the ones who had done this to me.
So - at phase three here - I can't tell you my anger is gone - I raised my voice at home the other day after a long trip - I can say I was tired - exhausted - I can come up with excuses, but ultimately it is on me - my anger has diminished, I try to do all I can to live in a state where it does not consume me - and on paper - I know it is only a fraction of what it once was. Part of this is thanks to therapy, part of it due to all the eastern books I have read - including an excellent one I already cited by Thich Nhat Hanh about Cooling The Flames - but I am delusional if I ever think it will ever entirely leave me - and the reality is once in a while I probably am going to blow up. Hopefully it will happen less and less, for a shorter and shorter time, but my anger is a part of who I am - it has gone from suppressed, to out of control, to finally an occasional erupting.
But this actually was not meant to be just about anger - which is a part of the equation - but more my alternating between love and rejection - because I know on some level that this lifelong search for love is the center of my karma. In my relationships - all of them - and of course that goes without saying that my marriage is my longest and most important - I have experienced both extremes, and the pendulum swings back between one and the other. So I can cry victim, I can talk crap about my wife and how evil she is and everything is wrong that she does, or I can realize that on a karmic level - I chose her to live out this alternating set of extremes, and if it was not here it would be somewhere else. That notion of an elusive mate who will love you all the time, take care of every need and desire of yours - hell - I bet if she was out there, I wouldn't know what to do with her. Early on in my relationship with my wife, when the pattern was starting to unfold - I realized there was a bit of a deja-vu here - that she was reminding me of every relationship I had experienced that had failed - and I on some level - when I was trying to track her down at Balboa Park for a meeting that had gone all wrong - this must have been in the summer of 1996 when I first started dating her - I realized that if I didn't face it with her, it was going to be with someone else - so why fight it and instead just take it where it was going to take me.
So - 11 years later - almost now - here we are. We have had some wonderful times together - when it is going good with her, I sometimes feel like I have died and gone to heaven and can't believe how well I have it. And of course, when things are not going so well - well - you can put two and two together. At this point in our lives, with both of our hormones going south - hers approaching menopause, mine approaching "manopause" - a phrase coined in the paper, and then the stress of a child who has symptoms that keep her from sleeping and going to school, the long search for treatment - the setting puts a ton of pressure on us. We have cultural differences, differences of where we want to live, we have the predictable conflicts about physical intimacy - we have come to a truce in the past regarding a lot of these, but at this point in life - it is pretty tense, I am sure the notion of separation and divorce starts to float out there once again - and really who knows what will happen. I am not a fortune teller. I know 11 years into the longest relationship I have ever been in, I can see why people have affairs, I can see why half of the people get divorced, I can see why for the other half that sticking it out is sometimes the most difficult task anyone can deal with. Ironically enough we turn to marriage for love and companionship, but in the end I think it can only last if you know how to survive on your own and find a way to meet your own needs so that you are not imposing them upon another individual.
So - the opposite end of the pendulum - the one I am obviously experiencing now, brings me back to my life task - the one I have experienced from birth - and that is to find within myself that which a human being can never provide me with. Although I have no subscribed religion, the notion of a Goddess figure - is kind of my do it yourself approach to dealing with this, borrowed somewhat from Pagan and Wiccan religions, but I am not really into the spells and potions and all the stuff that goes with it. It is my task to find the love I am seeking in my own spirituality - that has to come first - before it can be physically lived out. Hell - my poor wife is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, she has issues and tasks of her own, she is isolated, exhausted, hurt and how can I expect her to be my saviour. Right now she has to be where she is, and I have to be where I am and it feels like two people living alone in the same house. Maybe it will get better, maybe it will get worse - maybe it will just stay the same - but this is what it has to be and this has been what I have chosen on some level - my karmic choice, my destiny. I know for myself running away from this is not the answer - after all - "there really isn't very far to go" as a wise Hunter once said.
So - here I am - it ain't easy - it is sad, but life goes on. The mountains are still beautiful, the sky is still blue, I still wake up and life happens - there are people to meet and deal with, dogs to walk, songs to hear, and music to play.
So the lyrics I just wrote a couple days ago - will finish this post - just have now uploaded (link here): My space the video - as this entire post is kind of a lead up to the ideas expressed below:
My Sweet Love
Come now too me my sweet love
Nurturing love, beautiful love
Open up your loving sensual arms
Massage me with them, caress me with them
You know how much I'm hurting now my love
I've sought you out in others who couldn't provide you, my love
Heal this broken bleeding heart my love
Let me float inside your belly - my sweet love
Come now too me my sweet love
Unconditional love, all accepting love
Take me just the way that I am
Don't ask me to change, or even to explain - my love
You know how much I need you now my love
Appear to me this moment, right now - love
Fill my heart with soothing, calming medicine
Let me merge together with you my love
Be now here with me my love
Fill my lips with the sweetest, soothing kiss
Come and cry with me my love
Let our pain become one, our souls - become one
Now's the time to hold each other love
And to drown out all our sorrows in our love
Please don't ever leave me my sweet love
Come to me love, be with me now my love
Hold me now forever my sweet love
posted by Zook at 6:25 AM
3 Comments:
I have a friend who, through pure torture, asked me to read your recent post. He asked me to explain it to him... but all I have to say is, "WHAT???!" You write a lot but never seem to come to a point. I don't doubt your life is just as pointless.
The point is that Suzie's 'bout as faithful as a slot machine
Miles, time to take a step back, and yet another step back.
Happy 30 years Cornell !!!
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