In Search of Depth

My recent absence from my Facebook community has made me consider my relationship to such things. My world does not seem amenable to postings or, perhaps, I don’t know how or grasp why. It’s not that I don’t have a life, with eating, drinking, people I love and people I don’t, joys and pains, death and renewal, holiday celebrations, reactions to news and the political stage. Nor am I indifferent to people’s troubles. Something, though, seems out of rhythm; and short reactive postings don’t have the luminosity I seek. After all, it took the writing of three books to get through my ideas and experiences with reincarnation, past-life therapy and karma.

I’m attracted to the novel, but less in entertainment and consumption than in ideas that take me into deeper thoughts, and experiences that take me into explorations of sound and rhythm through poetry and music (or yet another musical instrument). For me, a few good conversations make for a good month. Media outlets are unfaithful seductresses, luring me in with mostly-empty promises of escape, enlightenment or communion. As enjoyable as media at times might be, my yearning is for intimate conversation, the heart’s shelter, words of truth and the flow of inspiration that comes from an invisible world beyond anything the captains of industry can comprehend.

The spirit of this time is provocative, though transitory, full of manufactured emotional reactions, passing (though enjoyable) fashions. Although not devoid of its beauty and inspiration, there is another spirit that would call some of us into the deep end of humanity’s divine and animal natures – deep enough that these – that seem so far apart – meet as one, and call us into the invisible world of ancestors and spirits, and into the things of this world that are simply overlooked by virtue of the speed of living or garish clamor thrown at us by those who want our attention and thereby profit from our distraction.

There are also events that happen inside: thoughts we didn’t know we could think, ideas we didn’t know we had, concepts that come to us from another place, images that come from another world or another time, and the voices of poets, wild women and men, and the uncanny silence of the listening forest. Don’t get me wrong: I love the sensory world – landscape, curving form, music and laughter, well-spiced food, a voice speaking from the heart of truth, winds, rivers and trees, and a hearty beer. They all have their value and beauty in their own right, but they can fragment me or make me whole, drain me or enrich me, depending on whether I take the time to honor the god that brings them or the god that’s in them – and that requires investment in the non-sensual and, at times, the nonsensical.

All that said, I’ll still post on Facebook, but more of my effort will be put into this blog. In a couple of days, I’ll start posting a seven-part series on the extraordinary stress of the last year or so, and what to do about them without becoming like the miscreants to which we object.