mustard!

but tell me, how are you really, he asked.

i went silent.

yesterday evening i had a couple of friends over for dinner in the garden, that is, we had a grill party for three. these two friends are married to each other, and i, of all people, am one of the marriage witnesses. mind the fact that i am at best critical of the marriage institution, and all much more pro-family. to be family in my book you do not need either the state bureaucracy for confirmation, nor a DNA analysis. to be family is a matter of values and shared experiences, something about caring and sharing in life.

last night we ended up having a most revealing discussion about mustard. it so happens that when i went to the supermarket to grab a few items and the mustard was on my shopping list, i got grabbed by one of those pretty teen girls on summer vacation to be interviewed about my mustard shopping habits within the context of market research. now, i buy mustard maybe once in two years, i am terrible brand unfaithful, and i can tell the difference between french dijon and süss-senf (that is easy) but really of all the candidates for a market research interview i am at best not very middle of the curve. besides since my son is in the usa this household's mustard consumption has gone down considerably. he was fond of eating french fries with mustard. needless to say that the deep frier has also moved to the cellar and is being totally ignored.

it appears that i am not typical when it comes to mustard. my friend with whom i have spent a couple of weeks at the beach not so long ago shares with me at least a similar brand unfaithfulness, however her husband is throughly meticulous as to the choice of mustards that go on his table. buying the mustard is one of this man's many contributions to family life. last night he set the table, and of the three different kinds/brands of mustard available in my fridge, two met his criteria and were on the table. for a good while last night we discussed the politics of mustard, and frankly that topic does beat discussing the events in lebanon right now. i have hit the point of refusing to discuss the present day war. i am tired of it, and i am very tired of humans fighting each other.

i have a deep love and longing for family and my life has been etched by having my own family torn apart in a feud that i will never understand, but which i have had to accept. it is the way it is. all my life "family" is what i have looked for and tried to create in this empty and meaningless life of mine. slowly it is starting to dawn on me that perhaps my life was meant to be otherwise, and that the search for family i was to find elsewhere and with another expression. being a pacifist is one hell of a bitch. in a world brimming with frustration and aggression, how do you create peace? i decided to start with inner peace, nothing else is within my power.

my dear brother, so how am i?

Technorati Tags: aggression, family, freedom, friends, mustard

23 and 368 others

no kidding!

"23 and 368 others"  was the fine filename that my system picked today for creating a VCF file of my address book contacts (mac-ese for same item in normal language) so that i could convert it to a CSV file to get them contacts on thunderbird. am i a geek? i'll let you be the judge of that. still the "23 and 368 others" made me laugh. it looks like i might believe in redundancy and contingency.

"23" in my address book refers to 23 an absolutely great photo sharing site, better than flickr in may ways. i confess to have gotten a bit tired of flickr, i keep on being faithful to buzznet, my very first blogging site ever.

"23" is also the nickname that i use to designate a man with whom i have had an interesting intimate affair. at this point i will let you conjecture how a man got such a cute nickname in my book, and most likely your imagination will make you blush, and if it does, that is really good. but given that just last thursday night i heard the sigh of relief from another man whom i just had told that i wanted to be left out of his relational dramas, because after all -sight- he was starting to get jealous (of the others). 368!

i am bound to see humour in the oddest of places, even in a filename generated automatically. when my legal-brains friend and i talk about my escapades with this one man, we do refer to him by "23" and he is not even aware of the man's first name, much less his family name. discretion is a natural trait of good lawyers. to name "23" by his civil name would clearly be a violation of the nature of our unspoken agreement, and it would add nothing to what my legal-brains friend and i do share. i have violated this agreement once and i hope that i will not end up regretting it one day down the line. sometimes my ego interjects some crap into my life, and then i may have some cleaning up to do later. this is the nature of dealing with humans. shit happens.

so, what is the nature of an intimate affair that has anything to do with the matter of how i am doing today? what does "23" the man have to do with any of this, what does he have to do with me anyhow? i do not know. i know that a few weeks ago i did see him and i got to experience another side of him which i had had no clue was there. the greatest of all gifts one human can give to another is to allow the other to just be as fucked up as he or she really is. that is, giving up the masks and the pretenses is simply another gate to that paradise that i call serenity.

"23" came to my rescue one day some years ago when i was feeling and being rejected  by this one fellow with whom i had the audacity - make that neurosis - of falling in love with. then there was "23" whom i bumped into one saturday while doing the weekly shopping downtown. you know how the story goes, man and woman get together, it looks like it is all about sex and then you discover that it is just about freedom to be oneself. some people call this the relationship between a whore and its client. if that is so, i am all for the whore relationship. there is something very authentic and honest about such a relationship.

how am i feeling today? today i feel good. i must have slept a good 12 hours during the past 24 hours and i really needed it. i also found myself at two in the morning with the cat in my bed and wondering why this has not ever happened before. this morning the cat caught a little mouse out in the garden and spent a good while playing with the dead mouse for a while tossing it up in the air. see, the cat belongs to a neighbour, but this cat has taken it on itself to court my company and has spent quite a bit of time with me lately. if the garden door is open it comes in, and i, being a cat of another sort, had no problems with allowing it to jump on my bed. my limit is however reached if it ever tries to bring a dead mouse to my bed. 23 and 368 others be warned, no dead mice in my bed. wireless mice designed in california are excepted, transgenic mice are included in the exclusion.

Technorati Tags: change, intimacy, intutum, philosophy, psyche, mice and men

a simple word

on wednesday i got up at five and had two soya cappuccinos in the garden while doing a buffer spill before going to training. wednesday morning training is as close as anything comes to being sacred in my life. do not ever dare to think that you can come between my wednesday morning training and i! alright, by now you know that i exaggerate on occasions! sometimes i cancel wednesday morning training on short notice after i have spent a whole night working. this time i arrived at the dojo certainly wide awake, but for some odd reason my blood pressure had yet to reboot.

i suppose that i am once again talking to my belly button and doing the kind of mind fucking or buffer spill-out that precedes a full core dump. it is lunch time and it is stormy, i hear thunder outside and i feel like an hurricane inside. how do i get to do a core dump without blowing a fuse?

easy. code is the solution. you have the right code, you can do a core dump in all safety. yes, software of the third kind, this is my own very soft being. i feel the wind, or do i? i am sitting here in the cooled garden and i wonder who is writing, is it the cyborg? clearly the stories are bubbling and i have a ton of work that must be done in the nonfiction section of my existence.

no, i am not writing this in the voice of the cyborg, this is me, whomever that me might be. i am tired of being tired, and i am full of energy all at the same time. it is friday, and i have started the full core dump. the agitation from the inner hurricane of emotions is starting to calm down.

love or hate, what is the difference i asked another. he claimed to hate a woman because he loved her so much. yes, that is one claim that he can make. i wonder how i would feel if i was that woman? could i then feel anything at all?

indeed i have never been here before. still on wednesday i spent some time talking with a dear dear friend. he is one of those dear friends that when i hear about his domestic marital troubles, i have a need to get drunk out of my wits for the pain of listening to accounts of such human drama becomes too much to bare. at times like these it is very easy for me to understand how one can become addicted to the relief that alcohol brings. alcohol is a narcotic, albeit technically speaking i have no clue as to what its classification in the pharmacopeia it might be, and am much too lazy to look it up now.

the long talk with my friend yielded an eye-opening experience: i am finally discovering who i am. i do not know how to describe it, but i cried and i cried with a certain joy of having had the opportunity to meet his parents and to have felt loved and understood by them. this happened many years ago and now his father is rather ill. my observation is that i do fall in love with the relationships that my friends have with their family. it is the only kind of falling in love that is not neurotic or psychotic.

i have grown rather weary of that neurosis that we call "falling in love". yet, this is one of the everyday routine neurosis that happens to normal people. in that respect, in having experienced this neurosis so many times, i am damn normal. this is however the end of my normalcy. i am tired of this kind of normal, and i am tired of falling in love. i am that woman whom that friend claims to hate because he loves her so much.

when i first read that message my immediate reaction was that i want even more distance from that sort of emotional drama. what does love have to do with it? nothing, nothing at all. i am. period. do i ever love? do i ever hate? are those two not two sides of an emotion associated with dysfunctional attachment to another human being?

truth is that i have been investigating the issue of money and sex in relationships. sometimes i code it into my own less than prosaic diversions on whores and samurai, but then i could as well call it business and ethics in an interrelated world. although i am quite fond and adept at using the scientific method, i am doing a different kind of investigation when it comes to the subject of money and sex. i am looking at it through the experience of growing up in a  schizophrenogenic  household. growing up in such an environment is not necessarily what i would recommend in terms of privilege, unless of course you were born bent on becoming either a writer or a psychotherapist. in the latter case, that is, if you are bent on making a career in literature, philosophy or psychiatry, then the  schizophrenogenic household and a facility with critical thought will became assets that can only be envied.

all sarcasm aside, that kind of household, does not provide much in terms of nurturance, and it does imprint unconscientious programming that to unravel takes great discipline and greater pain tolerance. namely, you do get imprinted by the undiagnosed and untreated neurosis of your environment that to all on the outside looks normal and even privileged. the façade looks good while the core has long imploded in a schizophrenogenic person.

having survived such rearing, the individual develops a few unusual sets of survival skills alongside with a particularly well tuned antenna to all such behaviour. do recall that the other coping mechanism available is to lose your mind.

he fell in love with me and i have spent days and days distracted by such seductive distraction and taking a fucked up emotional bath. observing myself in the last few months has been fascinating and at the same time revolting. the more i looked at it, the more i saw myself being lured into what looked like a double bind situation. but it was not a double bind, it just looked like it until one week ago.

what happened really?

while i never had an existentially viable option out of being in a relationship with my parents as a child, when it comes to being in a relationship with a man, i do have a choice. i can say no. say no or do tenkan, either way it is something like cutting a gordian knot.

small wonder that for the past couple of weeks i have been having one hell of a time doing tenkan on the mat as though i was the bloodiest of all beginners! it has been as though i had almost forgotten how it went. for non aikidoka, tenkan gets you off the line of attack and facing in the same direction as your attacker. fascinating, tenkan is required in my life and my body forgets how it goes! damn, my head knew what tenkan is, yet it happened that several times i could not execute it when it was called for. this wednesday, circulation unrebooted and all, i could do tenkan again when necessary.

still, it had all the taste of existential struggle. last night "no" rolled over my lips easier than i could have imagined it. now i am getting messages about love and hate and how i am wrong and contradictory. i am all of those, i have been all of that in other's opinions. your utterances are not my reality. i am also off the firing line. the aggression that i was feeling coming at me is nothing that i am ready to deal with at this time. some people call this love, others will say that i turned down a man's love. you can write your story in any way that you want, and you can be inspired by me to paint your most villain of characters. i am unimpressed and the buddha will once again smile.

last weekend while driving to our hiking place my friend with the blogging questions asked me one simple question to which i could answer without reservations for i knew that the question came from a concern for me, not a preoccupation with how things look or an attachment to a particular concept of how it ought to be.

it is so easy to confuse sex with love, and the love with money. it ought to be no surprise that one can also get muddled about sex and money. you can buy money with sex, and sex with money, it may or may not have anything with love.  you add human emotion, call it love or call it hate, to the above ingredients of sex and money, and you have all necessary requirements for dysfunctionality in a relationship. no, thank you.

Technorati Tags: schizophrenia, schizophrenogenic, storytelling, tenkan

lurid, pale, ghastly, dismal and sallow

yes, i knew that such a title would get you going and pop you out of whatever doldrums you were in. no? rats!

i love rats! rodents. disgusting little vermin that i associate with that so very human and so admirable novel by albert camus, the plague (la peste).

happiness is assigned to having my online dictionaries working, and a slew of reference works which i can consult and intellectually masturbate over. the mice, the rats, and all that sort of stuff, do not terribly excite except for human's abhorrence and repulsion of such living creatures. is such reaction natural? are we reacting naturally when we abhor nature's little creatures classified by the bipedal as rodent? mammals we are, both of us the bipedal and the rodent.

a friend of mine has recently asked me all sorts of good questions about blogging and why i blog. i may have satisfied him in other aspects of our shared weekend, like hiking and cooking, with my answers on this subject i may not have done as well. truth is what it may be, but i really do not know. blogging for me is still very experimental on both the technology, social and writing aspects. why is it important for me to so often share the outpour of feeling, emotions and random mumble jumble coming out of my head through my fingers?

come to think of it, i can manage to come up with a rather plausible and rational explanation for my blogging activities, and that i did in all sincerity with my friend.  still, i have no certainty as to the validity of my arguments.

then we proceeded to discuss my relationships with the muses, those that i call my muses. this one issue is even more perplexing than that of my blogging. this friend and i enjoy a very long and sincere friendship - i have quite a few of those - that allows me to ask equally probing questions about his relationships. seeing a lot of my friends struggle recently through all sorts of relational drama, i also asked this very enlightened being, how it felt now that the relationship with his longtime partner has come to an end. i could not have anticipated his answer.

i have lived for over fourteen years in the impression that this was indeed something very special, the kind of relationship that i would never be able to create or share with anybody. he does not have much of a tendency to beat himself over past mistakes, nor of attributing much meaning to what happens, so he just commented that the relationship was basically over within less than two years after it started, however he had something about a commitment and he went through thick and thin with this woman. i remember some of it, i got it served as a side dish on many of our joint dinners. still, i too did not make much of it then, after all, being a friend i listened to my friends long complaints and dissatisfaction. after all it is normal that when two people get involved, things get involved. still, this is the same person who just a few months ago i saw being quite devastated. this is a man whom i have known for many years, and just a few days ago i hear him confess to that feeling that wants to cling on to another human and make a relationship out of it.

this was a shock and a reality check braided into one nice bundle. i thought that i was the only lost soul that has ever ended up in a relationship out of fear of being alone and then went into one big proof of concept exercise called commitment. he did not use these exact words, somehow that is how i understood his commentary. in time he and i will go over the details and dissect the anatomy of this communication in all its gore and glory.

when another friend of mine, and that one i have known much longer, tells me that i need a man in my life, i wonder what he means and why on earth he is thinking this. you need a man to take care of you, he said. do i?

i think that i need an ultra rich uncle to die and name me his sole heir, i could use a bit of real estate and cash. i have no living uncle. all my uncles are dead, i had two. one was a precious and gentle soul who passed away before he was forty, and my other uncle is one that my psyche killed long long ago while in real life he only passed away one year ago. neither was rich, both were survived by a whole bunch children. conclusion, inheritance is not how i am going to get some wealth.

in recent weeks i have found myself commenting to both my therapist and close friends about my stories with men being nothing more than a distraction and sidebar in my life. indeed, sometimes when i look at it, that is what i see. men are sort of amusing distractions, a source of pleasure, an incentive to irritation, and indispensable friends.  so, when my good faithful long term friend and colleague in italy tries telling me that i need a man in my life, my immediate reaction is that that is exactly the last of my necessities. there are already too many men in my life is more descriptive of my own call. still, there was something deeply familiar about the fear of being alone and the desperation associated with it. this fear has passed, and may it rest in peace.

these days my fears have another hue. being alone is not an issue. i do not feel alone, i like being by myself. being by myself has become more of a necessity than having company. i love company and often have friends over or visit friends. not all my friends are men, many are. i still have a whole lot of women friends. when i spend time in the middle east, then i spend much more time with women and throughly enjoy those times. so, what is the hue of my most recent edition of fears?

let this be a warning to you all that should you ever venture into psychotherapy, then you may have to part with a lot of popular, useful and worn out concepts as to what it is that humans fear. those fears, are the first layer of the grand-onion that fears end up being. to delve into one's psyche, the meaning machine, torturer and transponder, is to reach into the spirit's turbid waters and mind waste products. it just does not make for a pretty, gentle, or smooth sight. that, after all is the nature of nature. rough, incongruent, abrupt, surprising, changing and unpredictable.

my friend curious about my blogging and i went hiking this weekend. hiking in the alps does not expose anybody to just postcard melancholic looking alpine pastures. the abrupt cliffs and deep gorges, the waterfalls, and the rock-slides are also part of the landscape. there is very little that is particularly gentle about the geological history of the alps, and it is obvious when you walk around or climb the trails. this bit about the gentleness of nature is an idea, a concept, that needs to be disposed of. it is simply wrong. wrong it is and very very romantic.

between muses, men, friends and blogging what is it that i fear these days?

reality.

Technorati Tags: authenticity, essentials, fear, friends, movement, muse, muses, reality, therapist

about men and women

i had a fantastic evening on friday with my legal-brains friend and accomplice in decadence. i arrived late at the rosengarten to meet him and in one hell of a fucking mood. i simply had too much energy and that was after a rather intense and humbling aikido training.

the training started at 6 pm and with the present temperatures, above 30 during the best part of the day, even at that hour it is hot. aikido dogis are heavy, like judo dogis, and the practice is physically demanding. to compound the heat and the movement, we were only three and i got put on the spot like in an exam. all would have been well except by (gyaku hanmi) nikyo i had a blank, and then by shiho nage and then again by kokyo nage... at that point i really wondered where my aikido had gone. i imagine that it felt something like what a man feels when for the first time he experiences some form of erectile dysfunction. the fear of impotence is there grabbing you by the balls and it is not fun. it is damn humbling and your whole life runs you by as though you were on your death bed. that was it, say your last prayers! well that was how it felt, still that was not how it was. true is that i did draw a blank when a technique was called out.

after such a training i was fully charged up and at the rosengarten had to take a few extra rolls on the grass before i could just relax and sit down with my friend for a rather candid conversation about sex, our sex lives and taxes.

we were talking about sex, but then we ended up talking about money and our own behaviour towards both. i arrived to the conclusion that somehow we manage our sex life better than our finances. at least that is what i would like to think now in my own case.

i go through years of psychotherapy and then discover that my own parents are the "neurotic" ones and my brother and i have had to deal with it in which ever way we could. he is manic depressive and i have managed to wreck havoc in my life in a grand style. this i feel has more to do with my own expectation to be superhuman than anything else and there is absolutely no good logic to be found in it, at least, not at the surface. somehow, somewhere along the line of coping mechanisms i decided that it is quite alright for other people to be human, fallible, weak and distressed, while i was or am supposed to master it all with the placidity of a rock and feel nothing. even the fucking pope isn't infallible, why on earth did i get befooled into thinking that i had to be nothing short of infallible? (forget the pope, i do not like popes that much)

i know that it is considered a sign of ignorance and blatant immaturity to blame one's parents for one's shortcomings. fuck that idea, and fuck it really hard, fuck it like you have never before fucked another idea!

what i am doing can easily be called blaming others, i call it introspection, extrospection and critical thought. on some occasions i even may also call it the dissolution of concept. this has to do with looking at the causal humus on which this rose that i am has grown. the buddha would say that phenomena have no unchanging essences and that they exist purely in virtue of material and causal conditions or circumstances without which there would be no ever changing phenomena. yes, no unchanging essences. remember essentialism?

so here i am back to my wonderful and empty life. that was also how i went into the weekend, empty. there was one particular moment when i knew that there were a few concepts that had floated in my head just on thursday, had disappeared. surrender, there is no meaning. not really. yet, the psyche is a meaning machine.

Technorati Tags: empty, essential, money, monk, surrender

scared i am

blogging has been light on all fronts for the past week. i am scared. i have also written preciously little on my writing projects, and the only writing that i have done has been on my personal hand written journals. to cite a friend of mine, i have been going through deep and dark matter of the soul, the kind of crap that you do not wish to confront dead or alive.

can i translate this into anything that makes sense? yes, i can. for that you may need to read the story that i am writing now for it is a synthesis of the very dark matter that i am waddling through these days.

so, what is the issue?

the issue is intimacy and the fear of intimacy. it is not like i have not written about this before and like i have not given the subject a few thousand words already, still this is an issue that goes deep, very deep. it could well be that not all of us struggle with it, i know i do, and i know that it does not even look like i do. i also suspect that this is an issue that many people struggle with if i am to look at the statistics of  drama in relationships.

did you ever ask yourself why it is that some people in their loneliness find it necessary to form a relationship with a pet, be it a cat or a dog, still a non-human? human relationships have a pervasive quality that can lead to great confusion, mind-fucking, misunderstandings and overall passionate havoc that can lead not only to great frustration or great ecstasy but that can also become completely existential. people kill each  other for a variety of reasons, one of them are the so called crimes of passion that range from jealousy to greed and pass through the need to destroy. it sometimes looks like humans have the ability to get infected by psychological rabies and then become totally destructive towards themselves and those around them thus being the perfect self-destructive automaton. a frightening picture of humanity indeed. it is a picture, and it is a way of looking at what happens, still it is not the whole picture of humanity. none the less looking at it is indeed like going through deep and dark matter of the soul. that deep and dark matter of conscientiousness that makes so damn difficult for some to want to even look at it and confront it.

the other side of the coin is that human relationships can also bring you the greatest of all experiences, that of being fully alive and conscientious. we could call that state ecstasy, serenity or enlightenment.

the thing with a dog or cat is that it does not have the ability to get tangled in your psychosis. a cat remains a cat irrespective of how you are, and it will unconditionally give you its affection. it is not like cats do not have their own sensitivities and they can display great discrimination as to whom they are willing to trust and be affectionate with, still they will never get tangled in your own psychosis, or so i contend. if that is so, for many of us, a cat is the ideal relationship partner. all it needs is a bit of food and water and a few stroking caresses in the back.

scared i am of intimacy indeed. not that i do not have very privileged and intimate relationships, but much more that no matter where i am there is always a point where i get comforted with my own limitations. somehow this is about learning to live, and as long as you are alive, you are learning to live. in learning to live, you are living. at least that is how i see life. having embraced a path that i call the path of mastery, i made a choice that is irreversible. irreversible because it is a commitment that i made for myself.  having once tasted the serenity and peace that such a path can bring,  the only truth that i know is to be found in staying true to myself and the universe. in my book nothing requires greater courage than to stay true to myself. the only way that i can find that courage is by shedding the concept of courage and to remain present to the moment and to my own breath.

Technorati Tags: fear, mastery

thursday again

i have been a bit busy with the business of trying to figure out who i am. after much dwelling and contemplation of my belly-button, I must admit to not having found an answer. so, if you ask me how i am, then i am in a bit of a quandary since i can not even figure out who i am. how would i evaluate the how, if i do not know the identity of the id?

all of this has been precipitated by events of the past week during which i have found myself in situations that i can only describe with much humor and tons of sullen comedy. you could accuse me of being oxymoronic in my expression, but then i have been accused of much worse offenses.

why the sullen comedy in all of this?
frankly, i do not know. being at a lack of descriptives, this is the term that occurred to me. but imagine the situation that i found myself in last week. there i sat for lunch with a loved one on some beautiful place with a catchy name on the shores of a very well known italian lake, and he starts telling me a story about his cat. i love both his cats, and i am under the impression that this man and i have a relationship that could develop into something more stable and satisfying. after all, we have shared times that have been rather peaceful and regenerating. he keeps on mentioning that he might want to settle down sometime, and i keep on not knowing how to touch or respond to those declarations. i too feel that it might be time to settle down a bit more, but then it also scares the bejesus out of me because i have on other occasions made attempts at this thing called settling down - living with a partner - and for a variety of reasons or judgement errors, it did not work out and i found myself if not disappointed, at least with the feeling that the time was not yet ripe.

returning to the scenery back at the italian lake shore last week, i am listening to this man tell me how his cat vetoed the presence of another woman in his house, and how this woman somehow fled the scene in utter insult. naive as i am, i ask when that was. it had been last month or so. ah! i can live with this, ratio tells me. we had not seen each other since early may and now here we were in july, that makes it about two months or eight weeks and there is much that can happen during such a period of time. for some odd reason i had expected this man to not be seeing anybody else. clearly an expectation that is rather amusing given that there was nullo indication or declaration that it would be so. still, my ego was sold on the idea of my exclusivity in his intimate and affectional life.

this is the part where i start to understand how the world functions with a double standard. somehow this situation was not acceptable to me while i have managed to direct my attention and affection to others during this time that he and i have been seeing each other. still, i decided to fuck the ratio and go with my feelings and start the process of completing what was yet another affair. i am at best clumsy at the process of completion, and in this case i am even more clumsy than i can imagine. i simply withdraw from the conversation.

why do i need to complete another amorous affair? first of all i have at this point absolutely no desire to make myself wrong about this one. this is a relationship that i conscientiously chose and that offered me some emotional ground to be explored. i learned quite a bit about myself and i experienced another human being and his own struggles. the experience confirmed my observation that i need some time - months to years - before i know how to relate to another being with whom i am emotionally involved.

"emotionally involved" is one hell of an horrible sounding expression, however it very adequately describes what is involved in relating to another in one's affectional life. it is an expression and a state of being that has needed some reflection for me to grasp it. in my life as a coach or mentor - something like a therapist for people without clinical symptoms of psychological affliction - i have on several occasions had to examine the issue of professionality and relationship. it is common knowledge that a therapist, in particular a psycho-therapist, can not afford to get involved emotionally with the patient, the reasons for this are many and the theory is clear to those who have studied or observed the phenomena associated in such a relationship. i for my part needed to learn by experience. for one i have had excellent experience with being coached and coaching in an emotionally involved relationship, but what i had not known is that what is required in such a delicate situation is something on both sides that is difficult to find in normal, garden variety, every day relationships.

when some years ago my good friend the german architect and painter and i were coaching each other and sharing a bed on occasions, we also afforded ourselves total autonomy and absolute transparency that resulted among other things in unconstrained mutual trust. in this case although our relationship is maintained, the peculiarities and goals of our lives are such that we have not seen each other in over eight years while we remain the best of friends communicating by telephone, or in writing. however this is a very different premise from the one in a relationship that i have had more recently where the good man absolutely wanted that i coach him. i gave him all the warnings associated with such a situation including the fact of my own involvement creating blind spots in my perception, and that transparency and clarity could generate resentment from his side. he acknowledged it all, and it was one of those situations like clicking on the "yes, i accept" button in any software license. you say yes, but you have not read the small printing.  in this latter case i also had some misgivings about the situation and consulted with one of the people who trained me. he then told me that he would not do that, i argued the pro points, and then he told me to do it if i needed to do it. clearly i needed to do it, and i learned immensely from it.

in the past two months i found myself again in the situation of being requested for coaching by a man in my life. again i repeat my warnings and misgivings. in particular i know that for me to be comfortable in this situation i must communicate clearly and remain honest with myself. this is all rather theoretical and descriptive, but what was i to do? at that point i risked the whole of the relationship and i gave up all resistance. i listened to him, and i listened to myself. this time i did not have a man's wrath come down on me because i dared to unearth some vulnerability of his, instead i had a man who had gotten back in touch with himself as though he had found a long lost friend, himself.

all of this to say that to me these days it is important to remain true to myself and to not make myself wrong for my decisions and experiences.

come to think of it, i am doing rather well and this essay is far from complete and turning out a lot longer than i had anticipated it. i shall return to this, or not, on another occasion. i have some "serious" writing to do both on fiction and nonfiction projects with another byline.

what is the short version of the above?
first, there is one man less in my life since last week and he was like sunshine and paradise. i feel rather relieved by this, sunshine and paradise always with me and independent of another's presence.
secondly, i have had a few precious insights on how i function and how my psyche works that are bringing me much freedom do act.

Technorati Tags: abundance, authenticity, autonomy, coach, double standard, freedom, mentor, therapist, transparency, trust

the opposite of crime and punishment

what is it that meaning does mean?

at seven in the morning there is nothing more significant and refreshing than the sound of the blackbird chirping away in the garden while in the evening there is nothing more precious than a cat's sign of affection.

i went to bed last night refreshed by a thunderstorm and nurtured by the neighbor's cat affection. i was gone for two nights and it is my first absence since this young cat has been exploring our garden and insisting each time on coming inside of my office. just before turning in and after the rain subsided i sat outside for a short while taking in the crisp air when that cat slips from under my chair and paws at my sleeve. this is a very young and shy cat who has been courting me and my affection and maintaining the distance all the same, she has not yet been comfortable enough to jump on my lap or stay too long while i stroke her back. reaching for my arm with her sleeve is the biggest advance this cat has ever made in my personal space. i liked the gesture, it meant to me that she had missed not seeing me in past days. did it mean that? no idea. does it matter. not really. but tell me young grasshopper, what does matter?

i was thinking of some of the interactions and events that i had while visiting my friend in italy, and somehow the phrase "crime and punishment" kept on returning to my mind. it seems strange that i can get such a clear picture in my mind associated with this phrase. then i let my mind lose for a little longer and other phrase fragments blunder in. there is something about not taking it personally, and something about missed chances. above all there is that thing about that gut feeling of mine that i have so often vetoed and then superficially regretted that i have done so. if anything, i am starting to recognize resistance when it emerges, and the consequences of my resistance. the crime that i know is giving in to the resistance, and the punishment is nothing more than the consequences of giving in to the resistance and veto my own feelings and desires. while the regret associated with facing the consequences may be superficial since even in the face of confronting consequences there is always a valuable lesson to be learned, there is much more to be learned on the side of no resistance.

it was just a few weeks ago, not even two months, when i was faced with a situation in which reason and resistance were on one side, and my feelings and desires were on another. i chose to not resist those gut feelings of mine, for once vetoed reason, and have been dealing with this unexplainable thing called a sense of guilt, let me call this kind of guilt mental guilt. i suspect that guilt is a brain child devoid of emotion or feeling and by far not endowed with perception.

when i think that sometimes i attribute my good fortune to my ego's insistence in saving my soul, i am now starting to suspect that i have no idea about the workings of my ego, and that indeed i have confused my ego with my very being.

Technorati Tags: authenticity, ego, floue, fluage, integrity

revisiting the whores

i just got to the quaint helvetic capital today from spending a couple of days doing what i dared announce as "getting my head screwed back on" and a few other culinary delights in italy, more precisely somewhere in the luxuriating woods of lombardia. appropriately enough i got here just a couple hours before a thunderstorm hit the area. it is raining and i love the rain, especially i love summer rain. go figure, i grew up in areas with mediterranean climate where it never rains in the summer, and i, of all things, love summer continental rain!

back to the whores? what is this thing with the whores? it seems that this thing with the whores is something that i must investigate. i feel like sherlock holmes, or some other fictive character in search of the solution to the mystery. my present mystery: whores.

when in my last post i advanced the thesis that marriage is another form of legalized prostitution, i knew that i was stretching things a bit and that many people dear to me may take offence in such categorical declarations against the mopish mores of our society. to say the very least, i was in one hell of a mood these past two days spent in italy. when i mentioned this declaration while driving around to lunch on monday, my friend gave me a ney, like i was to understand it as he not agreeing. so i retorted in some sort of attempt at salvaging my boldness, that marriage is what you make it. to that last statement it seemed that he could subscribe. now, why did we not discuss and debate the issue as would have been rather appropriate and adequate between two not so shy people?

wrong assumptions. first my boldness at making such an assertion needs no salvaging, and i certainly could stand to learn to stand by my statements. but then there is always this bit about context. i what context are you doing what and why. what is straight and what is play? when are signals of play mixed in with signals of sheer earnestness? the next wrong assumption is about being shy. i am shy, and he is shy, for the first time, during these two days, i got a sense of it. so, now i am asserting that my friend is shy based on what i sense.  i have no confirmation other than the one he gave me when i asked him, did he confirm it because it is so, or was he just being agreeable? yes, i

once more, i do not know. i returned home with a feeling of lightness that i had seldom felt and with a few puzzling questions running loose around my head. the lack of anxiety about the answers to those puzzling questions feels very soothing.

the only thing that would bother me about my statement on marriage and legalized prostitution is when i think of a few people in my community whose life is based on integrity and critical thought. if i want to understand this one a bit better, i know that i am going to have to part with my shyness and indeed have the debate with one, dear and nameless ethical person in my life. it could also be that i do not stay with just debating with one person in this group, i might extend it to more. frankly, i would like to know what is at the root of my impulse to make such statements.

still, i am always in the lookout for a good oracle, so i beamed on my google personalized page and there it was, my horoscope for the day: It's a bit confusing today as you try to create the very same magic that often comes so easily to you. You like being on center stage and now there is enough energy cooking in your life so that you can put on quite a show. But something isn't clear and it makes you wonder if you are playing the right character or if you are even on an appropriate stage. Be patient, for this will only last a day or two. Then the rest of the script will be given to you and it will make more sense.

whatever it was that i did in italy, at this point i am refusing to take life too seriously. perhaps.

then after i hacked off two of my pending items for today i get a message on skype and a request to be added to my contact list. it was a brazilian colleague from many years ago. he rang me up immediately and it was delightful to hear his voice after so many years.

Technorati Tags: abandon, abundance, addiction, aggression, authenticity, inspiration, integrity, samurai, whores