Journal

I was wishing I didn’t still suffer and struggle so much, but that seems to be at the heart of our human nature. Without that first hand experience, which involves the whole human being, all our wisdom and understanding don’t mean very much. Each of us has a different and separate and lonely battle with what hurts us — but when we suffer, we know we exist fully as human beings. We aren’t remote and apart and immune. We are here. We are susceptible. Vulnerable. We can be killed, treated cruelly, maimed. Psychically and physically.

How hard to accept that. But as soon as that reality is embraced, we are given help we didn’t suspect, and couldn’t reach directly.

 

I’m a miracle worker. If my energy is centered and ready for use, I do things easily and lightly; I give where I want to give — not only impulsively, but consciously. At my best I do it with a kind of marriage of impulse and knowledge.

I’m a vessel in which this power is stored. Power I can use to accomplish tasks which I’ve chosen or which have chosen me. If I see the tasks as running my life and demanding what I must do, I don’t feel powerful.

I’ve had all these impulses and intuitions that have led me all these places. Now I’m there, where they’ve led me. It’s a good place and I have my hands full keeping up. But it is where I want to be. Psychically, I am ideally located — even if I can’t always feel it. My real identity of private me and public me is emerging — rocklike. I can’t go back now.

So much good happening, but other nitty-gritty problems, too. At least I managed to pull out of the dizzy spell problem and am functional. The toilet is stopped up since last night, and I’ve called about it. I’ve been out to the woods once already.

 

Mike and I got the catalogs mailed, though it took awhile. I didn’t get back here until nearly 12:30. Then the plumber arrived and fixed the “commode” as he called it.

They were kind in the post office, but what a drag. I still don’t understand how you calculate the weight and the rate. I bought stamps with the extra money, and then it weighed out differently, and I traded stamps back in. Etc.

One more nitty-gritty thing accomplished. But it has about taken my day. It has used me up.

 

It seems like the more I am me and do what makes inner sense and see and feel the results, the more I also encounter a certain kind of burden — I’m not sure what to call it — of people who haven’t worked their way through to an inner rightness. Their defenses and problems bother me more — become an extra weight of some kind — not all the time, but some of the time.

 

I’m reaffirming my need for this early morning quiet time, no matter what happens the rest of the day. Some mornings it’s hard to manage. But I do think it’s practically a prerequisite, though I know I can go several days without it if I have to. But I acquire a certain kind of psychic weariness and am less centered and ready for whatever happens.

My mind tells me: Your slow pace is good. Keep it up. It keeps you balanced and makes your acts the most meaningful they can be.

I got a letter about May being a month for radio to celebrate the arts . . . so now I have a date to be interviewed on WUNC next Thursday.

I think I have a new and stronger feeling about my life than ever before, in its effect on the world.

At first, when I thought about being interviewed, I thought about asking various people’s advice. Now I think I just want to mull it over — and decide, out of my own thought and experience, what I want to say.

It feels right, that I should say now, for radio broadcast, exactly what I think and feel about these things. I’ll let it ripen in me, what I will say.

 

Somehow, out of all this, I am feeling again powerful, or, maybe, in some ways, I am assuming power for the first time — more nearly consciously, and in relation to what is there.

And I think I can forgive all who act out of powerlessness.

Somehow, I’ll handle everything. I don’t know exactly how, but I will. And people will help me because they want to.

I think it’s the saddest, most pitiable thing in the world when someone is hung, knowing somehow what they must do for their own salvation, and unable to do that, and somehow thrown to do the opposite: to betray the one whose love let in, might have saved them. A Judas complex. Pretty terrible. It is bad enough to realize one has done what one promised one wouldn’t and denied, in the moment that counted, who one was, and what one knew. But far worse to be stuck in the place not only of denial and fear, but of active hatred and vengeance, set in motion by thwarted love, by the refusal to respond to what was there.

 

The day I’m taking off except for going to the office.

When Louise called last night, she used the phrase “my contract with myself.” I said, a few minutes later: “That’s the main thing: one’s contract with oneself.”

I want to think this morning about my contract with myself. I think what I pick up in some people is a failure of moral will. Most probably fail. The ones that seem to bother me the most are those who did help me and respond to me, but weren’t up to the natural balancing in the partnership. Who went a long way and then realized they weren’t up to it. I ask a lot. I need to forgive those who fail even though because of the nature of the relationships, when they fail themselves, they also fail me.

Sometimes I wonder why I’m not more continuously conscious, but I think it’s the fact that I’m a living creature. Part of me is like a squirrel or a bird, just here, alive, operating out of that life force in everything. I like to keep track as much as I can of where I’ve been and am and where I’m going, but part of the time, consciously, I don’t know where I am, but in fact, and all the same, I’m here. I’m OK. I don’t need to worry. I am what I want to be. My life is continuous and consistent and keeps sounding the same predictable notes, just as the wren does, without my having to figure out exactly how all this happened: how all these gifts and problems, help and hurt from others, ability to think and liability of thinking too much came into harmony and is. The me that is, just is. I am learning the implications and trying to keep up. I wasn’t prepared, in some conscious ways, for who I turned out to be. But if I trust this opening out of potential being, this becoming who I am, I think I’ll find it relatively easy.

Basically, I am myself: alone, writing and thinking: with my children; with you whom I love; with friends; with the writers and the work I believe in. It’s all different and yet all the same. The same fabric. And I’m fully in it. And how good that feels.

Facing my own real abilities more directly and accepting them (working free of the last traces of my Jonah complex) probably frees me to expect less of those who can give less, even if they pretend to themselves and others that they can give more.

I’ll probably, more and more freely, test out what is there, what I can build on, with.

I’m not sorry for what I’ve built. But I see now that some of those structures won’t hold my weight. There are fruits though.

 

I guess I can honestly say, in relation to all the people I’ve trusted who have let me down or haven’t been up to me, that I’m not sorry I took the chance. To lose is not the worst. To be in the never-never land they’re in, is the worst.

I’m not an automaton. I live each day, the best I can, responsive to what happens in it, the people I meet, what occurs. Things I write down on lists to do, get done, too, but more slowly.

I have, actually, a pretty good life.

I am trustworthy for a lot of people.

I was looking at what I wrote back in September. It was a heightened place. It’s hard to get close to that vision in its simplicity and clarity again, but it still stirs me, to re-read it.

I think I’m living that vision — I’m just not always seeing it as I did then.

Accept, I guess, that I won’t always be fully aware of it — even when I’m doing it — as I have been at times — but that doesn’t mean that I won’t have left the signature that I wanted to leave, that I was able to love, that I left a little more love articulate in the world.

 

I guess every time you act, you encounter a kind of resistance. You cut through obstacles, but some of them fly back in your face.

I’m thinking how I’m taking on my full adulthood — someone people can count on. By being able to take care of myself and my dependents, and respond to the needs of my friends when they need me.

 

Thinking today again about fate, the substratum of what is possible, and then the power we have once we are in close touch with what is there. Where the power to act and to change things and to create really lies.

I’ve been getting all the information I need about the substratum, the possibilities. But that’s only part of it. I think I’m glimpsing now where I come in. It’s one thing to choose to let something happen to you. It’s another thing to choose what you want to happen, knowing that the little bit you do may make all the difference, because you’re in touch with all the rest of it. The missing space — the unknown — is filled by you and what you do. And that counts the most.

Glimmers before, but this is much clearer. And I’ve been scared of it. It is equivalent to drawing a sword out of the stone. I am drawing my power to act out of a relative limbo of unconsciousness. Many of my impulsive acts were “right” and “meaningful” but the consciousness of doing what was exactly right failed me. I wasn’t quite to that place yet. Glimmers, but then they’ve slipped away.

I may still not be able to get what I want. I can’t go for things out of greed. But if I believe sincerely that something is for the good and go toward it, then I think when I act in accordance with my intuition, and in this conscious way, the likelihood of success is very, very high. This is a kind of magical power I’m talking about. A healing power. A power which will bring things into being that weren’t there before, because I can feel them potential, alive in the substratum, and want them to exist.