From my journal for September 1994:
My life. This is a time in my life when… well, I’m in the transition zone again, with that sense of floundering, old ideals losing their value, old structures disintegrating, and the new ones haven’t crystallized out of chaos yet. It seems like I spend a lot of time in this place, rarely have a safe structure or ground under my feet, usually feel that I’m struggling to hold on to my values as to a flag in a storm. What values? Silence, inner voices, the value of spiritual practice when there are no emotional consolations, the value of a life like mine, invisibly damaged, unheroic, of no use to anyone.
[Margin: O yes, thinking of someone saying an artists life is changing all the time, there never is any place to stand. Artists Way p 182 “Just when we get there, there disappears.” “The ruthless truth is that if we don’t keep moving, we sink to the bottom and die.”]
I’m also discouraged because reading over last fall I saw a lot of “insights” that I’m still struggling with, still rediscovering and trying to make real in my life. At least I “no longer” —— ha! there was one “no longer” in there that I had to sadly acknowledge was not true — probably about the airplane phobia. What’s different now? Just that I take the appearance of the same insights as evidence for how long the process takes instead of evidence that I haven’t moved at all. I have moved, but not very far.
I’m also feeling a little overwhelmed by my life, there’s so much happening that I have no control over. I have a sense of floating, half submerged, in a river in flood, being swept along with other bits of flotsam, all jostling together, and I could be smashed on a rock at any moment. The wind shakes the trees, water and leaves fall from the branches. I see a bright edge of cloud where the sun has almost reached a patch of blue.
What are we doing here anyway? I wish I could write a poem to express my sense of precariousness and transparency, of the landscape like a fragile surface, hiding layers of meaning and history, crushed and torn apart by relentless titanic forces. I think when people lived closer to Nature, the restless titanic forces were visible in the stuff of every day, now they are hidden by layers of padding that we create in our efforts to find security, to pretend that life is safe and not a perilous adventure. And the restless titanic forces also act in the invisible layer of the psyche.
From a National Geographic story on the Indian Powwow (June 1994, p109): “When I talked to a noted Lakota dancer about the unusual design of his regalia, I expected a description of history and research. He said: “It came in a vision.”
“I had a sudden image of a way of life whose surface is less solid than my own, a life in which you can see through the skin of the earth and time, as if it were only painted gauze, to the texture of the past and the visions beyond it. Indians scatter litter on the surface as if they don’t care, but they attend carefully to the layers they see on the other side. No wonder music and dance, those tools we use to reach beyond words, are so important.”
Reading this I am struck by my ability to sense so much life and color even though it is precarious, not at all safe or in control. It’s been a long time since I have had that strong a sense of the shamanic realm.