But what do you do, but in your boredom start writing again.   Even if it's dull, even to you, most dull.

"Your vitality is your destiny; it defines you and allows you to be creative.  It is your job to cooperate with it.  If you don't do your part finding a place for all your strength and promise, it will transform.  Instead of being receptive to the constant invitations to increase the life in you, you will start to be submissive to other people.  The object of your surrender will shift from life itself to a particular person or group of persons.  This shift in responsiveness creates a destructive patters known for decades in psychology as sadomasochism.

"The pleasure you would have received be being responsive to life reverses.  Now you may find pleasure in being disappointed, emotionally and physically hurt, or betrayed.  This is how I imagine masochism and why I think it is so pervasive.  It may be perceived in the tone of an interaction.  You're late for an appointment, and you berate yourself for habitual tardiness.  You could just take it as one of life's mishaps, but instead, you focus on yourself.  You can see in this example how egotism is part of the picture as well.  Instead of letting life happen, you imagine the scene as centering on yourself."

Thomas Moore, Dark Nights of the Soul, p. 241, Gotham Books, 2004


Well, that's what I read at night, after dinner.  Slowly steadily reading through the book that caught my eye the last time I went to the Palisades Library...

"Good god, that's me, to a tee," I say to myself.

And maybe this is why in a way it's like an act of faith, of "God," to let me this time to have away from the restaurant, the bar of wine.   What would I like to do with myself?

I don't mind at all the fact that I'm a nice guy.  But I can see how this played out in the relationships written of in my little Hamlet tale...

On the other side, there is the feature of living life, that it can be grim, that it is suffering, and that the main thing is to take away the things that make you understand other people, care for them, support them, in whatever way you can, and that is an unselfish thing, and the Buddha tells us anyway, that the Self is an illusion.

Meanwhile I am take the Padre Pio approach to this whole pandemic collapse of the modern world, and I am embracing my new humble friends of nature, the night fox, the bat at night fall, the mockingbird at dusk bringing out his repertoire, the river below, the trees bringing out sap and life again, the bald eagle.  Faith.  Along with prudent care and listening to scientific medical advice, the only way to get through a pandemic.

In a way I am as well set-up for all this as anyone, here at the edge of the quieted city...


One only has so much verbal gas in the tank for any given day.  You have to mete it out carefully, preserving, avoiding the desire to talk on the phone in the early part of the day, while still fresh.  You can coast your way in to some decent things, but you still have to be careful of distractions of the verbal sort.

So what have I not lived?  What have I not responded to?  The habit of submission, growing over the years...  It's not easy to think over.  I can see why some people would want no part of the submissive person I was, simply to avoid my disease, my pain, my bad habits, self-perpetuating.  Of course: run!

What do you do, now, to jump off the train, to escape from it.

Too nice to sit inside.  Time for yoga, to go do something.  Enough of the confessional.  Time to get out into the light, forgive yourself, move forward, and maybe, perhaps, things were simply meant to play out this way.