Anyway, here is today’s bon mot: Silence and solitude are mirrors which reflect one’s true Self.
I think this is true. Kahlil Gibran or one of the other usual suspects may have said something very close to, or perhaps even identical to this, but it feels present as an idea and sentiment to me at the moment, so if it is plagiarized, I am seconding the idea.
I was feeling very sad this morning. Rather, I was conscious of an antique, ancient sadness, one that I have felt since my youth. There are certain feelings you have to embrace in order to go through, but that instant, that moment, is so frightening, and so actually painful–for an amount of time impossible to determine from the outside–that most people who are hurt early in their lives never go there. They cross the long miles of sometimes long lives, without ever remembering who they once were, or what possibilities waited for them at one time, and never really left.
I am learning to go there, though, to focus on that one spot which every ounce of my being wants to avoid, to look away from, to distract myself from. Only through there can I find my true Self, and only then do I become free. It is the only way forward, the one place I most do not want to go.
If I might return to the excellent mythos of “Stranger Things”, you have to enter the Upside Down, through a scary portal, and you have to hunt down the monster, and you have to see your own face in it, a face of pain, of loss, of unresolved grief, of long term suffering, of keeping going when you couldn’t keep going, and you have to bring it home into your own heart. Then all the darkness disappears, and the world is right again. Both world merge. I think this is close. But I have not walked that path yet.
This is what I feel. This is my work of the moment. I will continue my reporting. It helps me clarify things for myself, and of course I continue to hope this is read by, and useful to, others. I am fine either way, but that remains my hope.