A Vocation of Transcendence

My mind in like living in a maelstrom right now. It is stormy and gray and tempestuous, it is no wonder I feel exhausted.

Generally, when children grow, it is sequential, an inch a season, a first word followed by more, followed by sentences.... milestones reached in a certain predictable order.

Even my physical growth never followed such a pattern. I was the size of a 3 year old in first grade, the size of an 8 year old in 7th.... and in one year, I grew 12 inches and gained 25 pounds.

I had no words, other than baby talk... and then at 4 I began to speak as an adult, and soon after to read college books.

My physical and intellectual growth never went sequentially - so I suppose I have no reason to believe my spiritual growth should be any less violent and disorienting.

I am spinning around, reading Chodron, and Hillman and Moore. I am reading mythology, and popular self help books on broken hearts. If feels like the top of my head has been cut off, and things are pouring in... or that someone has shoved a funnel in my mouth, and water is spilling through with no chance to catch my breath.

My days are filled with lofty thoughts of transcendence, and meaning, and God, and archetype.... followed by teen aged love lamentation and the broken dream of a relationship that never was. I dialogue with the many Daimons in my own soul, each clammoring and speaking - so much that I have ceased to address myself as "I" and am now using the non-imperial "we". "We are proud of ourselves, we did good, we just need to calm down a bit, and we will be fine".

So much seems to be happening on so many levels... all underpinned by a deep seated fear that I am only the hairless ape of outdated anthropology... we are nothing but biological creatures, we are born, we die... nothing more. All the rest are dreams and bones, and thoughts nothing but synapses firing in an inexplicable void. Rationalism is as much a myth as imagination, as all is constructed for no other purpose than the propagation of a species that is destined to destroy itself.

The thing that seems to differentiate the dark night experience from simple depression and stress is just that.... it is accompanied by a crisis in faith. You do what you must, and you work towards transcendence, completely without any confidence that it counts, is meaningful, or that there will be any light at the end of the tunnel.

In the midst of all this turmoil, I am missing a love that existed only in my imagining of the future, I am in production for a play that may make all my former dreams come true, I have taken on two more clients, I am beginning to take the courses that will allow me to perform psychotherapy on others (in a language I do not understand), and I have a day job that is being woefully underserved. And a string of house guests are coming... the house is a mess, the dog needs to be walked... and most importantly, I am someones mamma.

And I am doing it alone. And I can barely get out of bed in the morning for the apprehension that has settled in my stomach.

Being a rather dissociative person, I can watch my life and myself from the outside, and I can see that this is all good. (Even maybe the broken heart thing... the catalyst for all that follows.) - but from the inside, this doesn't feel so great. It scary and confusing, and I wish I could be comforted.

I prayed to God the other morning at church, and I begged him to take this cup away... but not is such earnestness as to be very convincing I think. And then, I simply cried. Because God is not the cavalry, and in his eyes, perhaps there is no good nor bad, there simply "is", much like the "I am" - and ultimately, surrender is the only choice we really have.