In my darkest moments there is not horror, not depression, not a full sense of lostness – just too many days without writing, without deeply feeling, without reflecting and processing the insanity of life, marriage, and fatherhood. Perhaps “a dull ache” is the best description of it – but the dull ache isn’t just a sore muscle. It feels more like a desensitization and depersonalization of living itself. It’s the inability to just fucking stop, breathe, and sink into the depths of the totality of being.
A melancholic, haunting fantasy of beauty seems to subtly haunt some of my days. It is an image of fifteen years from now, when our boys are full grown adults. My wife and I are a bit older of course, and yet we’re all just so at peace – joyfully and passionately enjoying each other’s presence. We’re at a cabin, or a beach house. My boys and I are waking up early-ish and going for a job together, or lifting weights. We’re tight, we got each other, we’re simply a loving, related family. It is a tragically beautiful and emotional fantasy. Not because I dread its existence, but because it seems like my attitude toward the fantasy is that it can only happen in the future. Almost as if I have to try so hard now, work so hard, make enough money, manically attempt to “become somebody” now so that then it can be enjoyed later.
If I could describe it as a bodily experience, it would be that my body is tight, rigid, breath constricted – trying to just keep up in the rat race maze, and never settling (until the fantasy could come true at a later date) into slowness of breath, relaxation, and current sensory reality. It’s in a way, running around negating all five senses, believing if I keep cutting off sensory inputs from the external world, the riches will be paid back to me later. In another way, “suffer the loss of bodily and sensory richness of life now, so that in can be lived later differently.”
When I read it back like that, it feels like a cop-out. Like I’m not fighting the good fight now. Knowing what I know about Jungian psychology, that the Anima (feminine personality of each man, his soul) is to be experienced primarily through his, or my own, inferior “weakest” function, it would make sense why I struggle so much with extraverted (material) reality. As an introverted intuitive man, I am most comfortable in the inner world of patterns, images, symbols, and deeper meanings. I am less comfortable and put together in the material reality of things. I often put my car keys down and forget where they are, or walk by the same cluttered pile every day – annoyed – and don’t do much about it. The impressions of material reality, through all my senses, can get incredibly overwhelming and stimulating. It can be too much for me.
However, if the Anima (the woman a man is inwardly) in me is to connect me to the deeper realms of experience, and be the bridge to make me more whole, she will come through sensory experience itself. Another way to say it is that the richness and depth of my life will not necessarily come to me through intellectual intuitions, or hunches, or grand ideas – but through bodily experience. That perhaps my intuitions will be a mirror-side of a current, ongoing, never-ending adaptation to outer reality. That my soul will feel most alive when bodily living is connected to imaginative, intuitive functioning. That just as dreams, creative visions, and inner reverie come so naturally to me, these same dreams, visions, and inner reveries will have their known, and felt, counterpart in what I experience in day-to-day, moment-to-moment living. It’s where body and mind, soul and skin, touch.
My intention of writing this tonight is because there was such a bridging moment that I experienced a few weeks ago that I cannot, and will not forget. My family and I were at my parent’s home for my younger sister’s baby shower. It could not have been a nicer day. Low 70s, sunny, light breeze and no humidity. At one point after the main activities were over, I could tell my youngest son, C (aged 6), was ready for a nap. He had come outside to find me because he is a boy that needs physical touch to feel loved and grounded. He came to me and asked me to pick him up and we sat down on my mom’s bench swing in her backyard. C faced me and hugged me as he sat on my lap on the swing. His head nestled on my left shoulder and I felt him gently drift to sleep.
I remember the way the sun rays were bursting through a tree and only raking the tops of my feet. It burned, yet felt so invigorating. I remember the sound of the leaves in the wind, party goers laughing, the smell of fresh cut grass, the sound of cicadas. The breeze danced across our skin, and butterflies whizzed around us, and I felt my little boy in my arms. We had no plans, no direction, no intention other than settling into those thirty minutes of letting go to sensory living. I was filled on that swing with an abundance of emotion, of gratitude, of wishing so much to imprint the sacred fucking wonder of it.
It took me on a ride through my senses. I felt all of them – together, and separately. It connected me to my heart, and I know for sure my soul was present. I didn’t want it to end. Now, it feels like a wild, fertile, vital animal alive in the recesses of my psyche. It pulsed with the heartbeat of something more than real. It wasn’t an idea, concept, inner vision – it was the simplest of of simple human moments of nothing – and everything – all at once.
In a way, I already know that the magical experience I just spoke of is possible consistently. I am aware that the portal of soul that moment bridged for me is more about tuning to a different mode of perception – albeit with much challenge – as much as I can. It is about valuing and being attentive to the sensory world. That the collective unconscious – the deepest layers of experience will come through outer reality.
-David