Making a decision regarding my feelings so I can move forward. Imaginary lovers and other phantoms are featured.
Different Ways #04 Life in Negative Space, Part Two
What do we do with the shocking feelings for others that we conjure up? Psychology would suggest that these deep jolts happen to guide a person to something unhealed. How does one know they are healing? Possibly by ending up feeling comfortable with doing what everyone else is doing as an expected outcome? What if the healing has nothing to do with the expected outcome? Does that make it a dodge? What if the healing asks a person to become different instead of merging into the status quo and that difference is the healthy way for them?
We move through life in an expected way. One way, we imagine for ourselves and another way, others imagine for us. When these two ideas of what is healthy and life affirming do not blend or agree, we have an anomaly. Where we have anomaly, we have a deviation to accommodate it and a decision must be made.
This is what has happened to me. At least this is the way I see it.
I was stuck with feelings that I realized that I conjured up and I struggled trying to honor those feelings. My options were limited. Shaming and canceling myself for feeling something I couldn't explain or verify by denying them or would I sanctify and keep those feelings secret and utilize them the best I could? I danced on the psychology of it like a logger trying to balance crossing a log pond. Psychology is what I knew the most about then. It wasn't enough or, perhaps, I wasn't enough; either way I needed to decide how to move forward. These were my options at that time and this is what troubled me in this section of this chapter.
Different Ways, Chapter 25, pp 186-192
Music: This song came to me on the radio as I was working out this week. It felt like it belonged to this chapter as I was writing about it at this time. It reminds me of my task of making good by isolating evolutionary ways to transform and release energies (mine and those of my ancestors) that are locked into a cycle of fear, bitterness and pain. This song makes a loose reference to the song Whiter Shade of Pale by Procol Harum so I linked to it in my mind. WSP is about shame and regret and forcing oneself on others for attention (so I deduced by doing some research on the lost verses in the song years ago*). There is much ado about this song from many different sources, none of which really matter because a song, like love itself, just is what it is to each individual as it is received. This is the beauty of music. I don't have one rational reason why I would choose this song but I did like it and I feel counseled upon hearing the line:
...don't hold anything too near
while we are here, my dear....
Thus guided...Sometimes a song just lands and there it is.
The Seattle band Sealife doesn't have a website, only a bandcamp site.
The memoir Different Ways: Revealing the Feminine can be purchased through my website using a link to Village Books at AlltheDifferentWays.com. There is also an eBook version available at Amazon.
The blogpost that outlines my intentions for this series of readings from my book, Different Ways, Revealing the Feminine can be found here on the post, Between the Lines.