I’ve Died Too Many Times to Not Understand This

I spent the weekend (and my wife’s birthday) at a B&B in some historic downtown town near St. Louis (Called St. Charles). The shop-owners are drowning in debt and whoever’s in charge of taxation for that town seems to mindlessly oppress them more and more. Such a beautiful area. And to hear everyone’s going under because…? They have to charge 50 bucks for a flash-frozen/microwave-thawed meal is bullshit and baloney.

The B&B was overpriced but the hostess was gruff and awesome. She had a million stories and they were bursting to get out. She cried when Cygnus and I left, today. I know exactly why. Sometime in her life, while working there, she found something deep, and according to her, nobody wants to listen.

Cygnus and I are in a strange place. She’s finding herself again, the parts I begged her not to suffocate when we first got together–and the parts she said she wanted to give up for the relationship–and while it’s a beautiful thing to see her unfold, grow back into her spirit, it’s drowning me.

The moment she turned "us" off and turned herself on, I realized I sat at the bottom of an ocean, and she kept me breathing. I’m having a hard time–as previous entries enunciate. She doesn’t want me right now. I respect it. But I don’t like it. With this job, with these terrible, thankless, demeaning hours, I return home to someone who doesn’t look at me twice. It hurts. I respect it, but it hurts.

Yet, simultaneously, we’re feeding off each other in a very different way–a way my previous SO’s couldn’t. A way that most people wouldn’t understand. She had a dream last night. I won’t go into details, except it made an impact on both of us when she woke up, it was so strong. And it’s been with her all day. So much so, she’s currently meditating on it. She left all the groceries on the floor, walked over the pieces of work we had to do, and went into her meditation room.

Stephanie (ex-girlfriend) used to laugh at me because she said, ultimately, fantasy is fantasy. She said it isn’t real. She said it’s a farce, a story, something to read and enjoy and, when it’s over, walk away from. It’s something to enjoy. It’s something I couldn’t ever share with her. I thought dating a girl with a mutual love for fantasy would be enough. No. It’s not fantasy when you’ve lived it.

So when I would wake from dreams as Cygnus did today, and I’d turn to an ex, and say, "This was my journey," she’d nod and say, at the end, "Must have been fun."

Cygnus said over the weekend, "I wonder how it feels to live a life cut off from your spirituality, from this big, other thing. I wonder how boring it would be to just… not have it."

It’s like living without the sense of smell, when you’re born with it, and you lose it somewhere around eight years old.

This understanding has left me a little cold toward people. Perhaps condescending. When I was alone in this world, writing like an idiot with a demon on his back, walking in a sea of–with a lack of a better word–mundanes, I was sad and outcast. But walking with Cygnus, a powerhouse with a spirituality and ability much different than mine but no less, or more, powerful, I’ve grown to dislike the judgmental eyes I get when talking about my work. The dismissive quality of average, unenlightened joe.

A few times, even, I’ve come to think of specific people as idiots. Stark, raving stupid. "BUT THIS IS WHAT THE ESTABLISHED ORDER SAYS!"

And where did this line of thought come from? Thousands of years. Tens of thousands. And it’s only come about in the past, say, three hundred years. YET IT’S THE BEST. Why? Because Big Business says. Because Doctor Patented Medicine says. No. No no no no. It came from somewhere.

Brilliant minds like Newton and Einstein and Jung and Curie and Gandhi and Nietzsche and all the prophets and Rumi can’t be in the dark, and can’t be BLOWING THE FUCKING WORLD UP with every step they take for nothing. You fight the established order, and you create something that pushes humanity forward. Or you don’t. Or you sit, follow the masses, Fight What they Want you to Fight, and live a life staring at the greats going, "Yeah. He had it right." And the status quo is needed. And the infrastructure is needed. And the dreamers-cum-doers are ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NEEDED. To the marrow of our ancestral unconscious–you know, shit that people laugh at in fantasy stories. Shit that people like Toni Morrison bleed in her writing, and Faulkner, and all these other greats people don’t take seriously anymore.

I think the time is long in coming for a spiritual renaissance, where Science doesn’t know shit because it sits beyond the status quo, and the machines. I spent a really, really long time without a purpose, writing for something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

Emily once asked me… "why do you write?" I said at the time, to be known. Heard. Understood. She asked, "To entertain or teach?" Both. But I couldn’t answer then, not fully. I wanted to say, "to make sense of all this craziness, inside my head, alone, because nobody else understands. To find people who share in this multifaceted truth, who understand that a dream is not, ever, just a dream."

I’ve died too many times to not understand this pain. I recently said this to Cygnus. For her, it’s a blooming. Perhaps painful, but she doesn’t communicate that. To me, this awakening, this opening is a violent tearing thing. A forge where all the burls and grooves and nicks are melted away, scorched off. A river where the hard edges smooth away. Excruciating pain that is not at all new, but only newly visited in this world.

This job is doing more for me, as an individual, than anyone could give it credit. It’s physical boot camp for the mental reshape.

With what Cygnus has shown me, I don’t care what Average Businessman Joe says about me. He’s an idiot and a tool. Sneers from the huddled masses only translate as foul ignorance.

There’s a truth to every aspect of our history, be it Zoroastrian or Agnosticism or Buddhism or Physics. People think science is this huge, all-encompassing building. They stare at the barest framework of a building, all girders and skeletal wooden bones stretching across the sky and say, "this will weather the storm." They think they can map the mind this way, in entirety. They think they can map the universe this same way, and stuff it into the airy lofts of such a building and consider it finished. They’re wrong. They’ve completed a rudimentary dwelling the aborigines in the rainforest use daily. And they sit around and pat each other on the backs as if they Did something. "Look at us. We are gods! We have managed to place our world, the rudimentary objectives of science and nature, beneath the rigid tarp of reason. Look at those idiots outside! Using all those outdated pueblos and cliff-houses. Look at how stupid they are while we sit in this massive skeleton."

More power to you. Lick your accomplishments, all smug in its unfinished glory.

And the scientists know it. The physicists and the astrologists and all those archaeologists know it. They’re the smart ones, staring into the things that talk without words, looking into abysses and following the math. And the businesspeople, the ad

vertisers, the talking heads interpret for the average. They smile and discuss global warming–or the apparent lack thereof–and smirk about the definition of theories, and filter all but the most fundamental of truths out of the data.

There’s more to this universe than science. Than physics. Right now it falls under "spirituality" because it’s not proven and patented. No rules are currently in place. It’s the Wild West. It’s the New World. It’s beautiful and terrifying and ultimately unmapped, despite the thousands of brilliant people who’ve walked its varied paths since the dawn of humanity.

You want to know the future of our civilization? Spiritual enlightenment. Plumbing the depths of the inside-out, of the planes, of the universe. It’s a simultaneous thing.

My best friend, Martin, said, in high school, he wanted to write a story that transcended the senses. He said it would take him his entire life, but he felt it had to be written. He was the closest person I had to being capable of understanding what I talked about, or thought about, or understood. He had it. He still does, and he’s now a judge in Chicago.

It’s sad these people are stuck in LARPing communities, and renn faires, and D&D re-enactments, and stuck behind computers and books and herb shops and the fringe of society. It’s sad you have to slaughter that which makes you stronger than the average joe to simply walk around in this culture. Fuck the culture. I hate it, and you’re ignorant.

Not you. But you. Haha

I hope she doesn’t leave me.

~x