Sexually In/Active

There seems to be a power that people gain when they are sexually active. What is it?

A unique brand of social approval and protection. A sense of achieved liberty in, what is supposedly, a liberated society.

Seemingly, ‘sexual energy’ meaningfully expressed can increase the lives of those involved. And it is, in platitudes at least, something everyone can find if they look hard enough.

The trouble is, people who are given sexual power and attention seldom recognize their privileges. What cannot be universalized, is universalized. Desirability is as tied in to class, status, economics, race, and so forth, as any other privilege or oppression.

What if you can only be inactive? Attractiveness is not equal, nor is confidence or mental well being; essential to having a sexuality.

The energy still exists, even in frustration. Yet energy must have some expression. Could it be that frustration is a font of energy which can be channeled anywhere, a constant motive to forward motion? This may be the saving grace of a lonely savant.

To be inactive in our ‘liberated’ society is seen as repression or a poorly made choice. But some people do not have a choice.

The need to be constantly active, or perceived as successful, is itself an oppression.

Why can’t consensual sexuality between adults be treated as value-neutral, rather than an ideal propped over and above our lives?

To cast off chains of actual repression is essential, but to replace it with competition and status anxiety is throwing out the bathwater, the baby and the bath.

Bunsen Burner

‘I work down town, cash in hand
Roofin’, plumbin’, understand?
Bunsen burnin’ ‘undred grand
I’m in this game for the pipes, the pipes.’

He’s a small white man in a big white van
Don’t get in his way or he’ll run ya down
He don’t like Arabs or people from Japan
Cos he’s afraid their out to rob his gran

‘I work down town, cash in hand
Roofin’, plumbin’, understand?
Bunsen burnin’ ‘undred grand
I’m in this game for the pipes, the pipes.’

He’s out of jail so he can’t fail
To subscribe to the Star and the Daily Mail
He’s a ‘decent’ fella who can tell a tale
He’ll respect ya, unless your gay or female

‘I work down town, cash in hand
Roofin’, plumbin’, understand?
Bunsen burnin’ ‘undred grand
I’m in this game for the pipes, the pipes.’

He’s working class but always votes blue
Just cos it is the done thing to do
Believes everything in the paper is true
He’s loaded with dosh, but not with IQ

‘I work down town, cash in hand
Roofin’, plumbin’, understand?
Bunsen burnin’ ‘undred grand
I’m in this game for the pipes, the pipes.’

He rolls with big boys not with the fakes
Fixes his engine when the motor breaks
Gives all the lads on the estate the shakes
Calls anyone with emotions a bunch of snowflakes

‘I work down town, cash in hand
Roofin’, plumbin’, understand?
Bunsen burnin’ ‘undred grand
I’m in this game for the pipes, the pipes.

But wot is the meanin’ of my life?
I’ve got half a house, a dog and a wife
Yet live in a state where pain is rife
Existential angst and perpetual strife

Owing to a childhood of rejection
Emotional abuse and a father’s dejection
So I bully others in acts of projection
To avoid the hard work of my past’s dissection.

Oiiiiiiii! Get out of it you c-‘

---

 

For American Audiences: Voting ‘blue’ in the UK would be voting for the Conservatives, who are right wing and tend to be capitalists.

Bunsen burner is rhyming slang for ‘earner.’

The ‘Star’ and the ‘Daily Mail’ are both horrid tabloids, the latter being the right-leaning prejudiced person’s bible and gateway to even more insidious ideologies.

Give not thyself away

Every time you reach out to someone, you give a part of yourself away. You have to hold a space for a relationship to develop. You have to take a risk which means the possibility of rejection.

Often in human-to-human interaction there is a power dynamic of giver and receiver, of actor and reactor, powerful and powerless. The one who is offering something is in a position of weakness, the other person has a position powerful enough to warrant someone else approaching them.

It is impossible to survive in this world alone, such would be a truncated existence. So we must transcend our shells and learn to interact with others. You never know when you will make a lifelong friend or start a satisfying relationship.

However, knowing when to stop is essential. And what is most important is learning the importance of keeping yourself, or not giving yourself away.

If someone is rejecting, why give them another thought? The connection can be cut away and you can regain that lost part of yourself. By undoing the initial reaching out, you cease to be rejected.

If someone is ignoring, why keep on trying with them? There are plenty of other people out there. It may make someone more mysterious if they are distant, but it is a power dynamic which is destructive to you.

It is far healthier to be discerning, to hold your dignity close to your chest. There is a balance to be struck: to be willing to try with new people but aware that it may not work.

This is the reality of human interaction. We are not all equal, nor all in equal positions. You can never fully trust someone who does not acknowledge this stark reality.

In a society of ‘words not deeds’, we are increasingly expected to trust people at face value. By what they proclaim to believe, or what they proclaim to identity as. I have learnt the hard way to look for ‘deeds before words’, to be more discerning and less trusting of others based on their surface-level bullshite. This rational cynicism has strengthened myself, and made the idealism of younger years look like the naivety it was.

To find true human connection is hard, it takes times and it takes work. But this is precisely why it is magical and worthwhile.

A hundred paths to freedom?

Imagine two scenarios.

In the first scenario Jack stands upon a plain, which reaches off into the far horizon. Leading out beneath his feet are a hundred paths. He can see nothing but the plains and the thin little roads leading off to nowhere.

In the second scenario Jack stands at the top of a commanding hill. He is at a crossroads: the path to the north leads into the forest. The path to the west leads to the mountains. The path to the east leads to the coast. The path to the south leads back to where he came upon the plains.

Who is more free?

In the first scenario Jack has a hundred potential pathways. He has a dizzying array of choice. But he knows nothing of where they lead. The paths simply lead off across the empty plains. There are no point of reference or landmarks, making his return to the crossroads all but impossible.

In the second scenario Jack has only four directions he can go. But he is stood upon a hill and can see where the paths lead. This gives him some idea of what lies ahead. He may not be a woodsman, but he knows what to expect from the forest. Trees, streams, birds, folks living in cabins, maybe a bear or two!

Despite the seeming lack of choices in the second scenario, the freedom Jack has is greater. His choices have more context and have more meaning. He can make an informed decision. And if the forest does not work out he can always back track to the hill and try a different direction.

The first scenario is more like a nightmare. It is flat and featureless. With no context to those hundred choices, Jack will have to choose one at random. This might be exciting and ‘adventurous’ at first, but it will quickly grow tiresome and anxiety-inducing.  As the paths lead nowhere, what is the difference between them? They might as well all be the same.

These are idealized scenarios, thought-experiments to get our minds thinking. But they are not merely abstract mind-games. The society of individualistic values and consumer nihilism is more like the first scenario. For instance there are hundreds of TV channels, but they are mostly awful. The promise of quality is false – advertising cuts programmes into three and wastes hours of your life each week; producers have to constantly churn out shows to meet voracious demand, so the quality is low. A hundred paths, but they all lead nowhere.

It is possible to have genuinely meaningful choices in life, but these require context and purpose. This should be our criteria of liberty – ‘meaningful liberty’. We should do away with any notion of ‘maximizing liberty’ as some indicator of moral good. It is hardly better than tyranny to live in a meaningless society.

So where do we find meaning?

Many of the things that are part of our ‘destiny’, things we do not choose, give us a massive sense of meaning. They are a context around which to build our lives. I think of my old friend, a philosopher of great ability, who sticks by Spurs FC through thick and thin.  As goes the tradition, you find the nearest football club to where you were born and then you support them. You do not ‘choose’ a team, it is given to you. Meaning and belonging is found within that context.

Likewise with your family. Your first relationships are with them. This has a massive shaping effect on your later relationships, even if you do not consciously realize how. It is a lifelong journey of discovery to work through these depths and there are no easy answers. But we do not choose our blood-family. Would we be better off if we did? Would the term family be able to maintain its meaning if we did?

And we can pull back further. The society we are born into and dependent upon, the culture that has been created for us, the first languages that we speak; these are part of our ‘destiny’, not of our choice. Yet without them we are nothing. Meaning comes when we realize that our choices effect not only ourselves, but also other people. To find meaning in society we must realize how our choices and desires are patterned by society – our dreams and aspirations do not emerge out of thin air. Knowing the sources of ideas, we can understand the forces that shaped who we are. Knowing humility, we can then create things for others as much as for ourselves; to live for others as much as we live for ourselves. Someone isolated from society, in an individualist bubble, can find no meaning. They are at the hundred empty pathways, every single one leading nowhere. Every adventurer they meet on those paths is going nowhere.

And then we can pull back even further, for society is dependent on Nature for its survival. Without the living world, we could not exist. The ultimate challenge of meaning goes beyond our lives, beyond our civilizations. It is to discover our place in nature, how our culture interacts with it, how we live sustainably within it to ensure a living world for future generations. This is our ‘destiny’.

Our deepest connection to nature is coded into us, evolving with every generation, yet continuous, leading back to some impossibly distant history which should lead us to nothing less than awe. The seasons and cycles of nature, the creatures which populate the environment around us, the plants and trees; all in incredible variety and multitude. We could not, given all the faculties of our minds, create a more enthralling landscape which can satisfy that natural urge to belong to something real and greater than us.

This is what is meant by the four paths upon the hill. The scope of choice is not so large, yet this is why those choices are comprehensible and have meaning. Where they lead is more clear, what they are is visible. Embracing our finitude and the parts of us that are determined is the key to meaningful liberty. And let us also give liberty its due, for what freedom we can have, we ought to have.

Jack shrugged his shoulders, hoisted on his pack and headed for the coast. He always wanted to try going on a fishing ship and with Spring a few weeks away, this was his chance.

Regeneration

Time heals nothing. Regeneration is what heals.

There is a common cliche in our culture. That time heals all. I do not believe this is true. In fact I think that this could be a destructive belief.

Processing and regeneration is what heals. These things take time, but they are not time itself.

Someone may suffer a traumatic incident. They could spend the next ten years moving from one distraction to another. In those ten years they might do no purposeful processing whatsoever.

We need to let our healing functions regenerate us. But to do nothing is frowned upon in productivity-obsessed society. You always have to be active, out-there, doing-something, between-jobs, saving-a-species, on-the-hunt, success-seeking. This busy-ness is not always out of choice – in capitalist society these things are done out of necessity as the anxieties of destitution hang above us. Hours spent lying asleep are viewed as excess, days spent idle are seen as wasted , the content of dreams discarded as trivia. Stillness is seen as wastefulness.

But this means we are denying our fundamental regeneration systems the opportunity they need to heal. The long periods spent doing nothing are essential to the somethings. This is especially true when you have to live with disability.

Of course, it is good to be active and to strive for things. I would not give up my life’s work for anything of this world. To do literally nothing would be the end of me. But the something should be done with the wisdom of the body in mind. The prudence of the body gives us our boundaries. We human beings are unique in that the capacity of our bodies can be overruled by the dreams of our minds. When we overstep our capacities too far, we deny regeneration a chance to recover us, and this is when we fall the hardest.

In the background of our lives, beneath the awareness of consciousness there are regenerative processes functioning. Psychic wounds are being healed, knitted back together by slow and purposeful creatures of the psyche; the healing forces of nature, insectoid and fungal, breaking down, recycling, processing. In stillness, they thrive. They must be given the time and space to do their work.

There is no all-heal. Life leaves its scars upon us. If we could erase our traumas or histories we would be destroying part of ourselves, not healing.

And of course, life ends with death – something we have no cure for. So to say anything can completely ‘cure us’ would be naive – old wounds leave scars, new wounds are always a possibility. But as much as we can heal, grow and understand ourselves, we should. Just because suffering is inevitable, it does not mean that it cannot be minimized or dealt with in a mature way.

I am glad I have been indulgent and given myself as many ‘years off’ as I have. I will  take as many more years off as I need to, working on my own projects in my own time, with prudence and patience.

And certainly without guilt.

You can run a thousand miles and end up going nowhere. Or, you can take one step in the right direction and make more progress in that one moment than some people will make in a lifetime.

Wounds never heal, but…

The body is wounded. It remembers the source of the pain, the severity of the pain, how to deal with the pain.

The knowledge is stored deep inside the very cells of the body. When next a threat erupts, the body is wiser in its defence. The wounds have taught the body how to react.

The memory of pain is essential to our being. It helps us survive, it helps us evaluate risks and to know whether we are strong enough to deal with them.

To forget pain and suffering, would be to suffer it again, and again, and again. In a sense, memory of pain the wounds they leave are less frightening then having to live them anew every time.

Not that we have a choice. There is no forgetting. Not until death.

The natural world we manifest within is harsh, it allows helpless children to be harmed and innocents to suffer. Some sufferings are so great that we cannot withstand them. We must repress them. Suffering is a constant, it is inevitable. Sometimes it is extremely powerful. In infancy and times of vulnerability, suffering can multiply to levels many times worse.

However repression does not solve anything – at best it can delay the inevitable. A person who completely represses their suffering is not free from it, despite their illusion of control. The body will cry out for the suffering to be seen and acknowledged eventually. As we touched upon, this has an essential purpose.

The repressor will maladjust their body to itself, live in a warped and truncated way. But one who feels suffering and truly knows it, is not necessarily any more free. They are at least more honest.

I believe that wounds never heal. Therapy could not heal me. Leaving therapy, I became a touch more nihilistic, because I knew I was stuck with these ‘conditions’ til the grave. But even though wounds never heal, we can learn to endure, learn to counter their destructive effects and learn to live around them. In this regard, therapy was massively useful.

If you are as wounded as I am, it does not mean your life is over. It may become harder, but life is seldom impossible. Ways exist to compensate. Consider the plethora of genii who had less than ideal circumstances to see evidence of this (Friedrich Nietzsche being my favourite).

At best, we can have stages in our cycles when we do not feel expectional levels of hurt. We also move in seasons and cycles. It makes sense that nature would not generate beings which are always one thing, fixed and unchanging. But we always cycle back to old sufferings, because this is how we are.

Finally, I wish to speak to those who harp on about forgiveness and moving on.

People who speak of forgiveness in healing wounds strike me as most bizarre. If a riotous vandal puts a brick through a magical sentient greenhouse, the greenhouse ‘forgiving’ the vandal isn’t going to repair itself. It will still have broken glass. How will it ever ‘move on’ if the broken glass isn’t fixed and the vandal held to account?

But this is what it is, and this is what we are. Or at least, so I believe.

Consolations of death

I have known from the age of four or so that eventually, we will all someday die. I used to fear the coming of my fifth birthday, as it brought me one step closer to that dark unknown.

There was no hiding the truth from me! But despite this precocious understanding of dying, the true fear of death did not manifest til around twenty four or so.

Now I have the ability to really feel the truth that one day I will be no more. Death is an occasion that happens to all of us and regardless of who is around us, it is the individual’s body that will let go of life.

The impact of death cannot be taken lightly. I believe that we live in a sort of necessary ignorance, that we will live forever. But sometimes it really strikes me that we won’t.

Perhaps death has the boon of encouraging better choices. If we can afford to live in its shadow.

In the dark moments where I fear and feel what it might be to die, my finite mind races to consolations, clutching in the dark for hope.

i) We do not know what happens: No matter how far scientific knowledge advances, no one can empirically die and tell us what it is like or what follows. As the bastion of science is chipped away and revealed to me to be one discipline of knowledge, rather than the discipline, I fear its conclusions much, much less. Anyone who says they know for certain what happens after you die is over-zealous.

ii) The return to the cosmos: Before coming into the world we were not as we are. After we die, we will cease to be what we are. Therefore death is a return to a previous state of ‘non-existence’. But if we could manifest from that ‘nothing’ into ‘something’ once, is it not possible that something of ‘us’ could manifest again in a different form? Or perhaps the pre-human us, if there was one, had some form of being of itself? We do not know.

iii) The cycle of life: Without something else dying it is immensely unlikely that you would have been born. What would you eat? What would the thing that you  ate have eaten? Even if we only eat plants, we are still part of a cycle of life and death, growth and decay. If my living forever prevented someone else from being brought into the world, imagine how terrible that would be. Death is part of our evolution, it allows creatures to emerge into the world and adapt anew. It is also part of our cultural evolution. Nothing is as vigourous or powerful as youth – imagine a civilization made up entirely of the elderly. Immortals would not change or adapt as well as mortals.

iv) It happens to all of us: This is a bit of a negative egalitarianism and not really much of a consolation. But everyone will have to die someday. All of the people in history, many of whom we know and love through their works, had to die. Everyone in the 18th century, for instance, is now long, long gone. Nothing can preserve itself forever in one form. Everything will go.

v) You will become a butterfly or a tree: But first you will be eaten up and shat out by a worm, vulture, fox or some such creature. Not to mention zillions of tinies. Lets not be sentimental or try to give this a happy, psychologically comfortable ending. The prospect is neither good nor bad, it just is. The knowledge of the seasons changing and things continuing on does provide some consolation. But now even this is threatened by human civilization. We can’t become ‘butterflies or trees’ if there are no butterflies or trees left.

vi) It can end suffering: For most in the world, life involves a lot of suffering. All of us will grow old and most of us infirm. Any number of unfortunate things could happen to us, no matter how well we look after ourselves. Life is so vigorous it strives to survive and we have great capacity to endure. But I would not want to age and age and age in a body that was falling apart. Death, though it is always sad, seems the lesser of two evils. I also often think of dystopias, where totalitarian governments have the potential power to torture people for an eternity, and I am grateful for the reaper.

The way the death of a loved one effects us is hard to describe. But it is powerful, so very powerful, and you never know what it is like until it happens. When it happens you may look upon that person in a different light. Even if you fought with them everyday, you might miss them, or realize how important they were to your life.

Death is so powerful. Don’t just read about it and think that will suffice. It is something you must explore yourself, think about yourself and feel for yourself. Anything less is to insult this most powerful, universal force.

 

 

Dreaming – the creative source

Every night a dream can generate a world in tremendous detail.

The dream-mind can populate these worlds with characters. Some known to us, some strangers, some hybridized. It can imbue these characters with souls so that they seem to be sentient and as real as us. Even when these characters are familiar and act completely differently in the non-dreaming world, it is easy to be convinced that they have always been like this. Sometimes characters seemingly interchange – two nights ago my voyage with Rich turned into a voyage with Jack, with no obvious reason why and no clear ‘cut off’ point. He just changed at one point and I accepted this as perfectly reasonable. In fact, it wasn’t until I woke up that I realized it.

Things that happen in dreams seem real and meaningful. It as if they would have consequences for us in the future. The people in dreams have similar moral value as those without. Our dreaming selves make moral choices.

What I find most fascinating is when the dream-mind hybridizes places. It can take the quality of a place and fuse it with another, creating something entirely unique. It can take me to an eco-camp in West London and a mere road away back to the horrors of my primary school in North London. Sometimes a sense of both places can exist at once and they can be fused together. Stranger still you can visit a place familiar to you, but things are different, and it is still familiar.

A dream can be so intense that you can wake up with the feelings you felt at the end of the dream still strong in your mind. I woke at 5am this morning after dreaming of being alone in bed with a storm outside and a suspicious noise, like an intruder in the roof. For about thirty seconds I continued to feel the dream, then realized that thankfully I was in the roof and had two friends in the next rooms. So I wouldn’t have to confront the man in the roof on my own if  he did intrude or attack me. Although outside there was an actual storm.

Being asleep is clearly not just an essential time for rest. It is an intense time of creativity and processing. The dream-mind is full of symbolism which cannot be easily translated into a logical world-view. The symbology must be given great patience and explored in the language of dreams. As this requires immense patience and detail, and as my vivid dreams are so overwhelmingly common, I have done little to truly delve into what is being expressed by my Self.

And there are questions about the ‘validity’ of any discoveries. Is the subconscious some kind of oracle which knows better than us? Or even able to tap into a ‘spiritual’ place of guidance, warning and wisdom? Dreams have been prophetic – I have felt revulsion for a childhood place in my waking life but always dreamed of going there again; living there, finding safety. It hasn’t made sense why I keep going back. But now my conscious mind has shifted its attitude and I want to go back to that place. The dreams were almost like preparation for that return. Now they make perfect sense.

Mysterious or not, every night is an aesthetic journey. Sometimes filled with horror, sometimes heroism. Occasionally, though rarely, with love. The interpretation that dreams are meaningless or sheer chaos is a great silencing to this part of ourselves which can express itself in pure form with such clarity. And the interpretation that it is just wish fulfillment or repressed desire is a simplification of an incredible creative process. Dreams may involve repression and wish fulfillment, this does not reduce them down to this.

Anyone who has ever written a poem, created a new piece of music, come up with an innovative engineering solution, or used any creative faculty will know that it just happens. It will often need editing, polishing, the craftsman’s discipline. But the creation just happens. The place where the ideas emerge from, where they are fused and worked and forged, is certainly not conscious. The miracle of awakened consciousness does not reach into the miracle of subconsciousness, the swirling, bubbling forces which we do not truly have control over and yet enable us to wield such creative power.

When I write a new song, which is very often, it is not the work of a conscious mind. I theorize that it is the same faculty which generates the dream world which enables creativity in the non-dream world. Things are generated, rather than created. Processes are constantly operating beneath the surface of consciousness and when allowed the breathing space to emerge can generate wonders from the very depths of us. I find myself asking: Where did these ideas come from? I did not realize I was capable of this.

It is then a great affront to us if we consider sleeping and dreaming to be a waste of time, or just a means to re-charge our batteries. For the most hardcore citizen of capitalism, who measures worth in their ‘productivity’ and dodges sleep like the devil, caught in their Faustian-pact with caffeine, I see a life half-lived. Not only destructive for themselves but to all of us. Fortunately people are realizing the futility of living to work and ‘waking up’ to the importance of sleeping. The next stop is the importance of dreaming.

Every night, with a good routine, you are likely to be strapped into the original ‘virtual reality machine’. But not one programmed by someone else to immerse you in their vision or story. One that is generated by you, exclusively for you, with the purpose of revealing something deep before you. Nothing could be more self-fulfilling or daring than to go onto that journey.

Part of my goal is to proselytize idleness, lying fallow and sleeping more. This isn’t just because I am lazy (though admittedly I am a bit!) This is to encourage people to access the portal into their deepest Selves and experience what is there – if not to understand. To take it seriously and if they have time, to even learn from it. I want the people around me to be fully people, not exhausted sleep-deprived zombies.

What better way to begin reconnecting to our nature than to take seriously the expressions of this deepest part of us.

All I have

All I have are faded memories

Of the songs, learned on the way

Raise your heads, face the coming night

For we all, must die some day

 

Know you not, of our destiny?

Brother dear, oh sister mine

For the fate of our trouble race

Is to strife, for all of time

 

Gaia screams, but we hear her not

For the warring of machines

Cut my hair, take my friends away

Kill my soul, for your dreams

 

Of a world bathed in concrete

A toxic sky, an acid sea

The cost of greed is humanity

And you still, want more from me

 

So I draw, this black shattered sword

And sing one, final song

I wish that I need not destroy you

But it would, right a wrong

 

All I have are faded memories

Of comrades, lost on the way

Raise your heads, face the coming light

The dawn is here, this is your day!

 

For Mitch

Completing the Circle

Why did I keep on dreaming of a childhood home, always at night, garden overgrown like a wild jungle. Why did I keep on dreaming of the past?

It was not the past. It was the future.

The circle must be completed and every point along its line must be passed through. As sentient beings move in circles, the past is to be lived and relived, to become the future again, then the past again.

Getting stuck is extremely easy – life is hard in this age, time for reflection is scarce. Discovering the true self is not encouraged – such empowered people do not follow orders or build craven systems, so we are separated from ourselves. And even if we were encouraged to find our true selves, the journey would be a terrifying one many would not want to make.

Depression, feeling lost, isolated, purposeless, insomniac and anxious – all this comes from stopping at a point, a failure to complete the circle. No wonder it never goes away if you never try to move on! Until movement returns, the soul is truncated, growth is violently retarded, the lesson is not learned.

The soul will always rebel, it cannot be silenced for long.

You may love where you are today and love who are with today. But this may not hold true in a year, or two, or ten. Places you thought horrible may again become sanctuaries, and safe havens may become pits of boredom. People you thought safe may become dangerous, people you thought you hated may bring tears to your eyes when they pass away. Emotions that you avoided may become more relevant than you thought; the darkness you feared a guide back to the path you must return to. Things change and shift because this is the nature of life itself. There is no solid ground to stand on forever.

The circle must be completed.

Of course we cannot see into the future, nor predict what it will bring! Life is a labyrinth which must be explored and traversed, not a puzzle to be pieced together by a mind from without.

I know where my soul is calling me – back to the source.

But why would a traumatized soul want to return? Because through adult eyes it can see anew, re-evaluate events, cast off chains of dread and haunting shadows, allow healing forces to enter the soul. With adult strength it can endure past endurance, face demons and scatter them before it. Prepare itself for the next challenge – for the quest is never complete and a strictly happy ending is never achieved. But at least there is always movement and change, as the seasons do change.

There is no use lamenting, where you are is where you are. Sometimes it is necessary to go on detours, to spend years in one place, to suffer for some greater goal, or to run off and go crazy. All that matters is that the circle is completed. Forgiving ourselves for not always being perfect or doing what is best for us is essential – we are finite and mortal modes of nature, rather than the little gods we are expected to be.

My rational mind could not make sense of that obsession with the past. Why was it always night time? Why was the garden always overgrown? The subconscious (where the truth of your self and its relation with the world truly lies) knew long before the surface-mind which direction it had to go. Such dreams seemed irrelevant or historical only because the part of the mind above water, above the mist and shadows, was living only its present and not its place in the whole. It was afraid even, of that whole. And maybe rightly so, because at one point it had to be. But where will it lead now?

All you have to do is complete the circle and you can find out.