Friday, 1/6/2023 Notes

 EWR: “Loving a story”. Chapters in a life begins to get at this and I'm at work on that. A thought occurs to me that I should view it as perhaps a travel log, like Marco Polo's adventures. Or perhaps that's a better way to think about the year ahead.

"What are the cards we were dealt”? A tarot reading? It's a great metaphor. I was talking to my major professor a few years back and we were talking about my teaching career and he said "I thought you'd be a great teacher but I guess it just wasn't in the cards". That kind of stuck with me in a way and gets back to my ideas about fate and destiny. Is there an oracle we should consult? Probably.

JW: I have some card decks that I would like to show you

in Julian. "Teacher" could still be in the cards, just in a different form. (And, of course, I resonate with that missed direction also.)

"Disconnect from family" this is prompted me to think about taking a trip in May to visit all three of my siblings. It was on deck anyway because we are having a ceremony in May back in New York where we're going to bury my mother with my father. I had already planned to go to this ceremony but I now think I'm going to expand it and drop in on my brother in Chicago and my sister in Albuquerque.

JW: With this trip in mind, the Esalen thing might have been overload for May anyway.

“Like yourself” this would definitely be a new experience for me. In some ways even more than loving myself (which strikes me as too narcissistic) the notion of actually liking myself would be a milestone.

JW: I wouldn't be on this journey with you if you weren't such a highly likable person. Makes me wonder why liking ourselves is such an issue. It isn't just us ... two VERY likable people😉 ... it's probably close to universal.

• Why would that be? What goes so wrong in our culture that so many of us don't "like" ourselves?
• Suggested activity for future: list things we like about ourselves and each other.

“Sculptured Gardens” let’s keep this one on our list.

JW: YES!

“Guides”. What guides do we need? Where would we find them? What do we want from them?

JW: Your asking a friend to guide you into art seems like a perfect model. Guides who can give us a lay of the land so that we can go more deeply into our own selves. Guides who open doors that allow us to follow our own path into the "wilderness."

Do me a favor and go ahead and post this if and when you have a response

Gracias, Eric ... ;-)

JW:

Risks and fears. There's no way to eliminate them except to not take the journey.

Mutual issues and challenges may allow us to see our own patterns in action more easily. Even making a relatively simple decision about whether or not to go to an Esalen "Playshop," gave me a chance to watch my reactions and identify patterns within the safety of our "bubble" where I knew I could trust the honesty of your response and not just hear judgment or easy answers from someone who tells me what they think I want to hear.

Trusting ourselves to build a container for growth. Designing holistic retreats using the clay of our own psyches and freely choosing gifts from what appeals to us from the world around us.

Bringing external offerings into our internal world.

Abandonment and attachment issues came early for both of us and set us on a lonely path. What we are doing as we face these issues and all of their ramifications together seems like an accidental falling into healing ... but unfamiliar ... waters. The likelihood that we will try to escape these waters at some point seems inevitable.

You probably have much more insight about what that might look like, but for me from my history, I would expect to create a "project overload" situation that would pull me into "mandatory" demands of time and energy. So, if I suddenly decide I have to focus on a new book or some such, I would appreciate your patience and recognition of the underlying fear.

As a matter of fact, I think that was exactly what was going on with the Esalen thing. The possibility of turning it into a project, especially a project that might involve external recognition/validation and money, lit up my brain, gave me something tangible to hold onto, something that I knew how to do, safe terra firma of the mind.

That's not what my heart/spirit wants and I am grateful for your steadiness in that particular moment. (You don't always have to be steady and I will try to be steady when you need it.)

If there's a kernel here, I've always wanted a deeply connected, spiritual experience and I am waking up to the possibility that, for whatever weird, karmic, psychic, or otherwise incomprehensible reason, we are creating exactly what I want. 

And, it's scary as hell. ;-) The only thing that seems scarier right now is not doing this.