I have to write about this some more, dang it. This is the blog-as-journal part.
It’s that damnable BUFFALO LIGHTS book getting to me again from the republishing, and I guess something’s just got to come out. Don’t get me wrong. The adventure is still ongoing, our move out here 10 years ago (it’s all in the book) is a mother of a done deal, and here we be. What was hard as hell in ’99 is not anything I would try now without a razor-sharp idea of what we’re up to and against, not to mention more consideration for my wife. And one thing I have learned in all this time is that nothing is ever a “mistake,” because we only do the best we can at any given moment.
It’s automatic: if you fall down the stairs, it’s not because you were stupid and didn’t look, it’s because looking didn’t happen and falling did. There isn’t any guilt involved, or shouldn’t be. The event is an expression of the totality of your self, in other words. It couldn’t have happened any other way.
But on to not taking it with you:
That was one of the things I kept telling myself when we were getting ready to move to New Mexico and wing it, that I “couldn’t take it with me” — literally and spiritually — so it was okay to sell my precious tools and hardware for pennies on the dollar, just to lighten the load. Let it all go (that’s in the book, too), and everything would be all right: what was lost would be replaced in the furious outpouring of cosmic generosity and love. Uh, more or less. And that’s basically what I did. What we did. I counted our Maryland property in this category at the time, of course, something to be shed of for the moving on.
The cosmos didn’t cheat me, either. You can say it tricked me, though.
As I was whining to my Jungian analyst in Zurich the other day on the very subject of realizing how badly I’d hurt myself by giving up the old homestead 10 years ago, “So I’ve gained all this self-knowledge, [etc. etc. etc.] and I know who I am, I’ve gone through all this, I know from direct experience that God loves me and all, and I know that I can’t take it with me anyway, and this is a good thing.”
“Yes,” she said.
“But dammit, I’m NOT DEAD YET!!!”
“That’s the catch…”
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