“After great pain, a formal feeling comes -“

                                               Emily Dickinson

   January 18, 2008 – I cannot begin to describe the shock I felt a few months when I came nose-to-nose with the unreality of my own life. I had no idea who I was, where I had come from. I’m still in shock, really. I doubt I will ever get over it, or should.
  There is not a great thinker I have read and admired who doesn’t make the same point – you have to know who you are. Merton says there is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than unreality. Campbell says you have to know your own myth, your own journey. Arendt writes that you cannot respect yourself if you do not know yourself, and the core of the ethical human, the elemental moral standard, she says, is self-respect. Lewis writes that man alone among all creatures can foresee his own pain, his own death and his own condition. He must, therefore, know who he is. It is not, one philosopher wrote, what you know, but what you do with what you know.
  Last year, driving with Izzy through the countryside, I fell into the shadows, driving by a pretty farm,  and I thought I would never climb out. I did climb out, mostly, but with the keen self-awareness that my real work has just begun, and at a point in life where I might once have fantasized I could chill out and hang around with the donkeys. Oh, hell, I didn’t really want to chill out.
  No, sir. I have a lot of work to do, and it has just begun. There is no rest for the bleary. And I will be forever keeping an eye out for the shadows, and never forget that they are close by.
  I am not a great thinker, but the way I look at it is this: we are not complete if we do not come to consciousness, if we do not become aware of who we are, and face the truth about ourselves. That’s when life begins. It began recently for me.
  I’ve never been good at asking for help, mostly because I didn’t know that I needed much. That problem has corrected itself. I’ll take it wherever I can find it.
  I always assumed that I was one of the healthy people, sometimes pausing to help the less fortunate. I do not believe that any longer. Humility is a gift, even if it comes at a steep price.
  For all sorts of reasons, I was drawn to the idea of saving things – people, animals, friends. I am now focused on the notion of saving me, and then we’ll see what I can do for somebody else.
  I have learned a lot of things this year, including how to shoot photos manually, and how to give a pill to a 3,000 pound steer. I have learned that you can help yourself, but you can’t help anybody  who doesn’t want to help themselves. Nor should you.
  I’ve learned that I married well.
  I’ve learned that sometimes you love something by letting it go.
  I’ve learned that real friendship is, by definitely, a profoundly mutual thing. You have to take things, as well as give things.
  I’ve learned that people sometimes do unspeakable things to children, and the children pay all of their lives.
  I’ve learned that dogs do have healing powers. Donkeys and steers, too.
  I’ve learned that you can’t hide from yourself, or your demons. You have to find them, root them out, confront them, and battle them to the bitter end, and they, like depression, can never be completely vanquished.
  I’ve learned to be open, not only because it sounds good, but because if I’m open then I can’t
hide again.
  I’ve learned that awful things can happen to you, and that you can, if you wish, bury them so deep inside of you that you no longer have any idea that they are there, let alone how they can affect you and the other people in your life.
   It is easy, I have also learned, and tempting, to put off dealing with them. To avoid them, project them, hide like a mouse in the barn for years and years – eons.
  Don’t. One way or another, they will surface, emerge, haunt, pollute and infect.
  So the good news is that I am facing the reality of myself. I am, in fact, much better. I love my work. I love taking pictures. I love my friends, family, dogs, cows, donkeys, goats, rooster, and even a few of the sheep.
  I am working on a true spiritual life. I am learning my own myth, beginning to understand my journey. I am working hard on self-respect. And I am carefully considering what to do with what I know.
   The bad news is that this work is never done, and before it gets better, it will have to get a lot worse.
    And, many days, it has.
    And I never forget, not for a minute, that I am a very lucky man, blessed and blessed, in all sorts of ways.
   Today, I made the trek to see a plain-talking therapist who is methodically sorting out me and my troubles. I would rather, I told her,  be at the sadistic dentist who tortured me when I was a kid and gave that awful sleeping gas than talk about what we were talking about.
    She smiled and said that time was up.
   You are working hard, she said. You are being open. It will hurt. See you next week.
   And this, I thought as I cranked up Patty Griffin on the car CD, is what it feels like to be getting better.
  
     Tommorrow: What is healthy?

                                 
                               “As freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
                                First – Chill – then Stupor – does the letting go -“