The prodigal daughter has returned a weary traveler. I will take my failure to blog for the last month as a sign that I have been too occupied with living to focus on any one thing for too long -- which is true. Parts of my life have changed a lot since I last sat down to crank out a blog entry. So, it was difficult coming up with just one thing about which to write. The obvious choice, however, is to write about the one thing which is everything. By that, I mean the overlaying (or underlying? or ubiquitous?) connection between and among all people. If life has taught me anything over the past month it is that our experiences, our feelings, our small tragedies and victories are never ours alone, but belong to a universal (un)consciousness through which we communicate with one another in the form of inspiration, energy, and emotion.
Between every two people who meet, a connection of some sort is formed, like a thread in a spider's web. The thread may be substantial, may grow stronger and thicker over time, or may remain merely a thin wisp of connectivity. As we meet people and befriend them, make enemies, hate them, or love them, our web grows. And, the the events of our lives, our experiences and the resulting emotions, and our shifts in energy send out intangible vibrations along the lines that can be felt by the collective unconscious of everyone else in our web, and on a more amorphous level, by the universal unconscious at large. It is this phenomenon that allows us to share our experiences with one another as a human race and build a universal understanding(the evidence of which can be found in archetypes that span eras, civilizations, and cultures). And, just as it is a process of sending energy out, it is also the process that allows the universe to give back to us exactly what we need when we need it -- sort of a Karmic reverb.
There are some ascetic religious sects that believe that exile is the natural state of the human psyche, that the only way to move closer to God is to, by physical and mental deprivation and self-abuse, remove oneself as far from the human experience and enjoyment of the material, timebound world as possible. To disconnect with humanity is to connect with God. As hard as I try to reconcile this mode of thinking with my experience and understanding of the world, I cannot.
For example, in the last month, a relationship that I value highly and in which I had invested a lot of my emotional being shifted from romantic to platonic (for most intents and purposes, it was a "break up"). A lot of thoughts and feelings ran through my conscious mind in connection with breaking up -- a hope that something would reignite, a despair that I'd never find something as special and unique again, a rejection of couple-hood and dating in general, a pessimism about the human capacity to love consistently. For a while, these things took up a lot of space in my brain and my heart, and I am sure that I was sending strong energetic vibrations out into my connective web and into the collective unconscious. And, while my mind struggled (somewhat fruitlessly) with how to explain what was happening to me, how to reconcile the things I was learning with the things that I already knew, and how to move on, the universe was quietly and methodically sending back to me the things I needed to heal and regain perspective (whether I knew it or not). One by one, people I had not seen in months began resurfacing. New friends came along who offered insight and reassurance. I was also granted free days alone, moments of creativity, and time for reflection -- whether I sought them out or not. And, through the mysterious workings of the universe, I woke up one day to find myself in a entirely different emotional place.
Quite the opposite of exile, I would describe my interaction with the collective unconscious as symbiotic -- a process of giving my energetic impulses to the network and accepting those that it sent back to me in return, whether they took the form of people and conversations or time and space. And, more than help me cope with the events in my life (which could also be described as a pattern of acceptance and exile -- which may be what makes living so painful), the inspiration and energy the universe bestowed upon me opened my eyes to truths about myself, about human interaction, about emotions, intentions, and love. I don't know what God these ascetics hope to access by their sort of severe detachment, but the divinity of a humanity so connected that it feeds us, heals us, and helps us grow simply by simultaneously tapping into it and remaining open to it is God enough for me.
_______________________________________________
Let me get back to you on restaurant/bar reviews...I've been to a lot of new places lately and need to sort through them!
