Please note:  When I write these pieces, they are an exploration of the world within my own self, and they are references to the experiences of my own nervous system and spinal column, my own individual yoga reaction, my own emotions about my own emotional and spiritual life.  In no way are they an attempt to claim anything about other people's lives.  Again, these posts are about what I go through, more or less, imagined or not, my own shortcomings.  They aren't meant to support intolerant views, and I say this because as I write I write without editing initially, in order to get slippery thoughts and dreams down on paper first.


Matters of orientation, personal detail, completely aside, I've come to support a kind of "conservative" mystical almost "Catholic" view (non judgmental and supportive about what works for people) on the holiness of matrimony (letting individuals decide for themselves what constitutes such a deep relationship that suits their needs.)  I can say this having failed at it, failed to foster it, to bring it.  I say this as a one who knows the unnatural darkness of bachelor life.  (Must be my job, bar tending.)   I wrote a book about how I failed at it, in fact, and I should not have failed at it.  It was a young people thing, a case of misunderstandings, insecurities, mixed messages, tension.  It may not be cause of poetry on the order of a Ted Hughes Birthday Letters, but failures have consequences none the less.  And I suppose they make you appreciate the good in life that comes along that themselves turn out to be treasures.

For years I wondered what was wrong with me, why I couldn't get anything together, didn't have the energy I should or the vision or the drive, living passively, feeling in general a bit beaten.  While it stared me in the face, I didn't know the effects of deprivation.  I wrote, yes, about the whole thing, which was cathartic, and a good thing in some ways.  Writing is spiritual, and so it is good.  I honored the sense of loss that I felt.  But I wonder how much of the things I did were self-medicating, attempts to get brain chemistry back to that feeling, even as it was just an inkling, of selfless love and communions tender.  I worked in a restaurant, just to be around people, to feel part of a family.  I had many friends who like myself found some escape by drinking together at the end of a shift.  There was art, and humor, and discussion, but there was also a huge space of wasted time.

Love, the spiritual force of the Universe, comes through you anyway, even as you are acting misguidedly, displaced from occupying its true seat.  (That only takes a small amount of intelligence to figure out.)  It doesn't go away.  It lies and waits to become active again, a force engaged again in the world, as if it needed water like a garden.  And it has a way of being engaged in the work you do, so if you brought some kind of love to a place of work, then nothing is completely wasted.

Naturally you become sensitive at people's self-medications.  It becomes a concern when people don't allow themselves to be driven by spirituality and love.  You see an attempt to divide people from their force of love, as if to conquer them.

But nothing can be done as an adult without the health of marriage (again, however you might personally define it) or the goal of it.  Nothing can be seen clearly without it.  One cannot go through the days without the good health the relations of marriage bring, I've come to believe.  And it is hard to put the cart before the horse, to put success and achievement before that which itself is transforming, life-changing.  Marriage is part of the calling, any calling.

So there seems to be a Catch 22, that to entertain the possibility of marriage you must be successful to begin with.  The hungry unwitting victim who suffers the lack of relationship, sort of doesn't realize what's missing, struggles and strains to keep up and fit in, has less chance at finding a relationship to sustain him.  The only option seems to be to find other poor but intelligent people sensitive enough to the lot of human suffering, other people with a sense of the innate dignity in the human being.





And this may be why when we go on the internet looking for something of interest, some answer to quench something, we're often left with that empty feeling, as if flipping channels on a television with nothing good on.