The Haunting of the Haunted

I started this page thinking about so many details from this day.  It's okay not to write anything down at all.

Electric is off, due to area specific thunderstorms, so working off my cell phone signal and this laptop.  I would like to write out longhand but probably won't.  Guess my son is in the writing mood tonight as well.

I do not always find peace in solitude.  I often feel anxious when I go into solitude.  Sometimes I long to turn down the noise...the fan, the TV, the daily living noise. Do I want to really think about shit?  Do I want to think about how bothered I actually am by trivial stuff---that probably does not matter all that much in even 30 minutes and definitely not in 30 weeks.

I am here now.  The rain is falling, the pebbles of rain fall across the landscape.  The order of things is unchanged.  Mary Oliver's eyes see what my eyes see.  I don't know my place in the order of things.  I do and I don't.  There is something that haunts me.  The Hunted Self was on Dubin's desk this week.

I peruse the conception of the haunted self, and the clinical implications are of course way above my educational background and perhaps intended for an exclusive audience--clinicians.  The haunted humans around me are discover-able.  Maybe as obvious as my own haunted self.

Self-cognition.  It's not easy to understand how that we as finite beings, can know so much and so little at the same time.  Dislodging trauma is not something most achieve while they yet breath and as to the living part during these few short breaths, how many of us are actually living?

I keep mulling it all over in my mind...why is the alcalde of Uvalde...not able to do more?  I  cannot imagine the immense pressures, the temptation to pull back, to shade the truth, to make excuses, to avoid that reality...how could any single human do anything less?

January 6 insurrection and the near coup d'etat...it seems like we must of necessity confront "all our parts" of our fractured selves.  What we have in common even with these fellow american insurrectionists is truly staggering.  We are more similar than dis-similar.   The "minor differences" create nearly a grand-canyon of separation.  Not something we can just skip over, obviously.

How can I BE?  What I am may not need to be adjusted to much, and then I think of the grand-canyon between myself, my parents, most of my extended family, and this does not even account for political differences, religious belief differences??? and then monsters begin to shadow any possible feelings of connection.

The socialite of my community has just "connected" with almost a dozen people.  I can tell she is in her happy place, and the interactions though casual are personal and meaningful.  I wonder what I could learn from her?  It helps to be in one's element, I suppose.  She is loved in her community.  I think she loves her community and life.  I'm an on-looker.  I can imagine that there are challenges.

Some of the best of us, those of us who seem to connect so naturally to our community, are likely lonely people.  Are we so good at human connection because we know what loneliness feels like?  We don't want another human to feel what we feel.  I suppose this is all conjecture.  I don't mean to posit that we must be lonely or that this "us"/ "me" is some special form of "enlightened" or that something is even wrong with us.

Human dignity likely encompasses rightly so, a self-cognition that eliminates the other's knowledge/awareness. Only I know this self-knowledge.  We can perhaps imagine that we "know the other" but I don't think that we really do.  We can try, we can experience a human closeness that feels pretty close to the ideal.  Maybe it's supposed to be an illusive ideal.  Maybe this is the beauty of this fact.

At the end of the measuring stick of human contentedness there must still yet remain some space for the unknown self.  How else would solitude not feel so terrifying?  How else would we have the knowledge to measure our connectedness or disconnectedness?  There may be some distrust, my own issue, coming through here, and I find there are others who honor the limited nature of how things really are.

For some very good reasons, ones that perhaps display a wisdom beyond human limitations, the continuation of the species dictates that there are at least a few of us who are willing to measure our divides, and at least attempt the seemingly impossible---precipice jumping!  Few, maybe none will be able to achieve a connected world, but let's at least build bridges or at least viewing platforms, and take in the views and be inspired to dream of what we want our world to look like...my vision includes freedom to BE.  Yours?