Showing posts with label Grief. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Grief. Show all posts

Sunday, March 09, 2014

The Pinch of Pain


This morning I find myself sitting next to the fire reading through material that I've been asked to read for a community rights workshop I'm interested in attending next weekend. The paragraph below hit me hard:

"Corporations and their owners have learned quite well that when you control the law, you can rise swiftly to power and wealth by shedding -- and shredding -- bothersome laws adopted by communities. By configuring and perpetuating a corporate culture -- that embeds corporate values into the culture: government bad, free enterprise good; jobs vs. the environment; efficiency and modernization good, leisure time bad -- people are slowly colonized to believe the unbelievable."--Thomas Linzey

We live in a corporate state. Corporations run our country. We simply go along without resisting real heavily. And if we do we know the consequences. I've known this for well over a decade now. But for some odd reason it hurts more this morning. I think the psychologist Thomas Moore referred to it as the "pinch of pain."

I don't know why. My only guess is that if one is going to stare this corporate state in the face one is going to feel pain and grief. I've learned that much on this path so far. To hold back these feelings takes more energy and just creates flatness.

The only thing I can say to myself is welcome to adulthood. You're not a child anymore. Welcome to the pain and grief of manhood. Real men know grief. Real men know how, as Robert Bly says, to go down in the ashes.

I continue on down the path from laws to legends.

We're all on it whether we like it or not.

Monday, April 09, 2012

Ashes

Woke up this morning feeling like I had to search this poem out:

Well, on the day I was born,
God was sick...
They all know that I'm alive,
that I chew my food...and they don't know
why harsh winds whistle in my poems,
the narrow uneasiness of a coffin,
winds untangled from the sphinx...

On the day I was born,
God was sick,
gravely.--Cesar Vallejo


As I get older I'm trying to accept this state of feeling.

Thank you to Robert Bly for introducing me to this poem.

Friday, March 16, 2012

Bringing It To Light

Reading through The Maiden King again this morning and found these words of wisdom about depression:

"...the only way out of a covert depression is an overt derpression."[Pg.67,The Maiden King]


He also mentions in this section that most men in the west suffer from a covert depression.

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Fear of Going Down

I had something else in mind to post this morning, but this poem by Antonio Machado fits the mood so well that the other is going to have to wait.

Mankind owns four things
That are no good at sea--
Rudder, anchor, oars,
And the fear of going down.--Antonio Machado