Days off.  It's as if I intend to put as much daylight as I can between time for my own work as I saw it and the bar.  I needed time, guarding it, not allowing myself time away from the creative task, almost an anti-social urge, balance after the intensity of work, space.

I needed the time to see, to interpret, to cleanse, to find my own thoughts again, free from having to please people and go along with the party.  It felt right to have quiet, to be awake while everyone else slept.

There are things to realize about ourselves, and this is why it's good to write, to leave a record, an account, a personal history of action, so that later, when wisdom has grown over.  Retrospection is then a good thing.  Then we are allowed to see a kind of unconscious saintliness about us, a spiritually informed kind of being, even if unaware of such qualities, except through the actions we take.

We connect these versions of ourselves with the things we learn, and if we take the Christian story fully we our own acts as how they might align.  And the main thing, given who we are and how we operate, is a sense of personality.  What do our own personalities, our own habits, our own quirks, our own passivity, show?  To what or whom do our actions and our style relate to?  How do we inhabit the Christian habit, how does it inhabit us?

This, being self-directed, self-reflexive, takes time and personal reflection, quiet, a break away from habits of popular time consumption and entertainment.

There comes then the ability to transform one's self, through observing the qualities observed within. A subtle power is released, a kind of splitting of the atom.  Transformation begins in the imagination, and this is why there is something sacred about writing and art done for the right reasons.

And this helps, over any daily choice between on the one side vanity and amusement and on the other  things that bring us a satisfaction commensurate with our spirit and a sense of seriousness.

That's why I kept at the creative endeavor so many years, even if it defied logic and practicality, for the discoveries and inspirations one receives in their own private chapel attuned to others as it must be.

The modern fear of Christianity...