Life is Speaking

It's been far too long since I have worked on this blog. It began as an initial outlet to modify the effects of my self-diagnosed depressive affect a couple years ago. Now it may be evolving into the launch pad to document a whole new phase of my life. I told myself that my initial foray into blogging was an attempt recapture my original passion, as a writer. In hindsight, I was fighting for the soul. I was trying to get back the self I sacrificed for an inauthentic image of something that had failed me miserably. The image of being someone that others wanted me to be.

Under the guise of a self-projected certainty to others, I was otherwise lost. (I imagined my self-projected certainty was experienced by many, as the arrogance of an angry, brooding person.) My lack of direction was an artifact of making far too many reactive decisions to the angst I didn't want to experience. I went to graduate school, because I was bored, lonely, and not sure what to do with my self. I trained for a couple of professions that seemed like a good idea, so I didn't have to deal with the agony of not knowing how to live life. I was in dating relationships with people than were less than what I needed rather than wrestle with my lack of self-esteem and undervalued self-worth.

I'm starting to think that, in some cases, depression is an often under appreciated catalyst by the psyche to capture our attention that something has gone wrong. Perhaps, depression is the soul's version of heartache that comes with longing for something more authentic. Consequently in those cases, what may be required is not medication, but the willingness to hear one's true self calling itself home.

I truly have come to appreciate the wisdom of the 12 Steps used in addictions recovery. The first step being to admit there is a problem. Given my predication toward crude language, I tend to re-order the language of first step that sometimes a person has to admit that shit is fucked up! It really doesn't matter who fucked it up, but that we take responsibility for putting it back together again.

The real questioned was how was I going to use everything that I had ever experienced in my life to claim the life I wanted. To paraphrase the writer Parker Palmer, how was I going to let my life speak to me? Likewise, how was I going to listen?

Since the summer, I've been listening to my life, as it spoke to me in a country town in Brazil while spending time with a Portuguese spiritual healer. I've been paying attention to its murmur while in a crowded auditorium in Detroit with an Indian guru. I've been engaging with my life's speak while poundings drums and plucking bass strings. I've heard what it had to say while taking photographs of nude female models for gallery art shows.

Life is always speaking. It's just a matter of my being attentive to what it has to say. Particularly, when life makes it pronouncements around places I thought I would never go, along with people I didn't intend to to meet. Life has a better sense of humor than most comedians. Admittedly, I'm not sure if I want to listen to life suggests that I go hang out in India for a while. Ah, who knows, but I'm still learning.