Lillooet, B. C. December 2, 2021
Dear Readers, it has been said by one of my meditation mentors that the most “bad ass” journey (in a positive and brave sense of that idiom) that one can take is the hike to the inside of your own mind. I have also been told by a local man who I am confident is qualified to say so, that in order to gain control of our life it is first necessary to surrender the control that we pretend we have. This is a terrifying undertaking for any man or woman. The more “in control” one is, the more unsettling is this most noble of all exercises.
I wish to add witness to the above two pieces of wisdom with my observations as a sixty-four year old man. In those years, all were spent searching outward and searching inward. I am such a man that all my experiences and the impressions they leave on me must be recorded quickly, so that I may share them with others and recall the flashes of illumination before they depart my mind like flocks of birds startled by a fire-cracker.
Thus, my new Correspondence section of this, the third iteration of my web presence, Artemisia. As stated above, in all my searching, I constantly reach a sort of cave, albeit, a cave situated quite high up a slope. I now know that I wait for myself in the seeming darkness of that cave. I now know that I must go naked (figuratively, folks) into that space. If you have ever had the relatively common dream theme of running around doing your daily routine and then realizing that you are naked, two things usually happen. One is that you cannot imagine why no one seems to notice or to care, and two is that you seem to notice and to care. Enough so that you will likely start awake as you seek to run back to where you left your clothes in the dreamscape.
I would say that this is no more than a common verification of the witting or unwitting beginning of this very process mentioned in the above meeting of one’s self. Verification that one must eventually confront oneself and that this is the hardest, scariest thing that one will ever undertake to do. It will involve going in unarmed and receptive. It will entail real energy consuming work, as one will be dealing with entities that have attached themselves to you and calling out vocal thought forms that have been grafted onto your mental circuitry through no fault of your own nor that of the owners of those opinions, fears, prejudices and perpetuated lies.
Yes, you will go in unarmed but you will not go in unable. You will go in as the strongest element known on our planet. You will go in as water, the sea from which all emotions constantly form and dissipate. You will go in with the power of water, of which you are chiefly made. Stones will be hurled at you in anger, disgust, remorse, guilt, loathing, jealousy, envy, fear, distrust, pain, rage and frustration.
You will accept them all. Precisely because you cannot be harmed by them, now that the spell is broken and you are in the cave. They will only make a surprisingly small plopping sound as your waters close over top of their disturbances. There, in the depths of a collective human emotional lake bottom, they will decorate eternity and provide shelter for fish. You will in time, tire of throwing rocks at yourself and it is my belief (or I wouldn’t be engaged in this meditative practice) that a synthesis of the purified individual mental you and the physical body housing your incorporeal and ancient soul will occur. You will be more you than you have ever heretofore been and definitely walking in good moccasins. It will have been like slowly taming a wild pony and in due time being happily born on its back to travel further and faster than ever would have been possible had you never sought the cave.
Consider this letter to be my declaration of not knowing much to teach to others but knowing enough to share my own wholeness in close to real time. I won’t even taint this project with “hoping that it accomplishes blah, blah, blah.” (to paraphrase a Swedish girl named Greta) In my truth, I would have written this letter with a firm belief that in conveys my truest, deepest, most pure, individual, unspoken intent, even if I had to press cuneiform into clay tablets, scribe polished bamboo stalks or quill these words on scraped vellum. I am in the cave, I can see my thunder-boy and he has great aim with his right arm. I have a lesbian soul gifted with the body of a man, so the outcome can only be auspicious.
There is very much happening in our world to do with mental health and all topics related. I used to deride this sarcastically or ignore it as not applicable to me and that is no longer the case. I have had in my own family a parent and an aunt who both were driven to suicide by a lack of coping tools and a poverty of understanding of finely tuned minds. Both people were capable of spontaneous brilliance. One, in the medium of physical art of all types of painting, drawing and sculpture. The other in ability to learn new things rapidly and to exist in vastly different environments with an ease that appeared unworldly and effortless but cost the ultimate price by the age of fifty.
Being hated by those less gifted, bullied by those in authority and used by the rest without commensurate compensation. Being expected to peel potatoes with a scalpel because of a special thread woven through that particular branch of my family. One that today’s genetic breakthroughs are beginning to quantify, qualify and to address. It appears that there is a very real problem when serotonin dissolves far too quickly after the body manufactures it. This is excruciating and when a person deals with it from birth, they innocently do not know that things are any different for other people.
Social structures, norms and institutions take over and flawlessly blame the victim and demand that one suck it up. Anything that can be used as self medication, will be used. This situation, in my case, included navigating childhood, adolescence and adulthood beyond middle-age not aware of being an autist and struggling to force myself into what I saw as a macabre circus. Now that I have awareness of my neurodivergency from the majority, I feel very blessed and have found much good company, particularly with aboriginal folks, who seem to me to share whatever genes Svante Pääbo has discovered and has linked to what we today call autism.
This takes us to the prescribed medication frontier. I have always been strongly opposed to modern medication but wide open to any herbal remedy, spiritual practice, ancient concoction, ethnic brew or self medication. I am no longer limiting myself to just those. Some good inroads have been made in alleviating suffering and I am now in possession of enough love for myself to feel worthy of alleviating some of mine. I also am willing to take an active, responsible self-help role with the guidance of people more familiar with that trail than myself. The folks who have blended brain science with already known mental training. It matters only their hearts and intent, not their colour or neuro-style. We autist and non-autist will share this planet regardless and we are all human. It may be that the genes I speak of save the day by quenching the destructive nature still carried by the majority.
I have been in the cave awhile now and many of those stones of medical mistrust are already lying in the bottom of my lake. I am happily and proudly taking a modern pharmaceutical medicine to address my vanishing serotonin problem that I have been enduring for sixty-four years. I mention this in the certainty that I am in no way unique to the mind-set I used to have. May another person reading this letter stop to consider that in 2021, in Canada, we would not let an injured animal suffer a tiny fraction of what we routinely allow ourselves suffer for the sake of our pride or mistrust. My sister told me that and it is true. No medicine is a “cure.” We are the cure. No medicine is perfect. To get well from anything requires a desire to do so and that requires a spiritual reason to exist. I won’t elaborate on that concept as it is simpler to comprehend when left unsaid.
In my Bobcat Logic radio show here in Lillooet and in my blogs of the past, Follow The Lynx and Stochastic Scintillae, I have put out some ideas that run contrary to what you are reading now. They crept in unnoticed according to how my mind circuits were running. That is reality folks. I am climbing my mountain and sharing the story of that climb with you. I take responsibility for myself and that includes what I say. I take that responsibility as seriously as the eagle feathers that sit a few inches away from my keyboard now and have all through the years past. I took a lot of tuition from a man who had a wonderful mind but a tragic negative outlook. To put it simply, he counted and described all the stones thrown at him with perfect veracity and clarity. He spoke unselfishly for all mankind. The problem with him, as I now have light to see it is, that his lake was frozen. Solid. The rocks just formed a big permanent ever-growing cairn of grief and hopelessness. No closure, no acceptance of the moment called now. No chance of ever experiencing or admitting to the happiness that is every bit as real, immediate, obtainable and omnipresent as is the grief and pain of human existence.
I have recently learned that our human minds are actually built to be biased for negative “what could go wrong” scenarios as a protective device. That is why we made it as a species up to now. It is, however time to tame or re-wire this inherited thought structure and move into a new phase. Should the worst ever happen, we know we would easily and quickly revert to our basic brains extremely rapidly and with no training required. To progress takes effort. To regress is effortless.
The man was Alan Watt, not Alan Watts the philosopher. Alan Watt the blogger, author of Cutting Through The Matrix. I state here that I have a deep respect for the mind and intellectual abilities of the now deceased Alan and that I have written him over the years and sent him funds on several occasions. I have had many a wonderful book come into my purview because of him and I do not regret him as a teacher on my road.
As I have stated before in another essay, the teacher and pupil, like the reader and the writer; form two parts of one whole. The beast with two books, if you will pardon my Irish humour. The trick, it seems to me, is to realize that there is a mutually beneficial exchange in the relationship and it is important to know when the “lesson” is over. Education, again, as I have previously said in another article, is not the filling of a bucket, it is, rather the lighting of a fire. Thus, I state here that I respectfully take my hat off to Alan and his dire conclusions. I no longer share or will promote those messages and indeed am taking those articles off-line where I myself can see his words creeping over mine like a strangling vine up a cedar tree. It is called “editing” and we must all constantly do this, but without fear of what we have said in the past. This is now and what I said before is how I got here. I wouldn’t take it back if I could.
Please see below, a set of entries to my Calm© app. This is where I am learning to meditate and to face the boy in the cave, make friends with him and lead him outside to meet the wonderful human world. [The boy in the cave analogy is my own and not taken from the app, which folks have far better analogies.] These entries are reflections on topics that come up in guided meditations. In my opinion the teachers and presenters involved are wonderfully gifted with realness, courage and compassion. They blend science of the mind and the best usable wisdom from all over the globe. I encourage anyone to check out Calm© for themselves. I am showing a bit of what it entails for folks who may be interested to try it.
This letter is not an advertisement for the app but I will mention that in a conversation with my wife’s head doctor treating her leukemia and subsequent stem cell transplant; it casually came up that the doctor herself regularly uses the same app as a way to strengthen her concentration, clarity, equanimity and friendliness. Those are the four mental muscles that have atrophied for most of us. Indeed it was my own doctor who alleviated my serotonin suffering that led me to the training and she is a regular student of it as well. Good company, indeed and all very scientific, responsible, sane and spiritual to boot. I thank you two ladies mentioned here from the bottom of my cowboy heart.
If anyone is still hung up on my earlier statement (smile), “I have a lesbian soul gifted with the body of a man, so the outcome can only be auspicious," please read and ponder this Oxford English Dictionary entry # 107453 for the term, lesbian rule.
Lesbian rule n. a flexible (lead) ruler which can be bent to fit what is being measured; (figurative) something, esp. a legal principle, which adapts to fit the circumstances.
Cf. Aristotle's description in Nicomachean Ethics (1137b30) of such a rule: see quot. 1869 at sense B. 1.
[After post-classical Latin Lesbia norma (1556 in the passage translated in quot. 1559), the more common Lesbia regula (a1536 in Erasmus), and their model ancient Greek Λεσβία οἰκοδομία.]
1559 W. Bavand tr. J. Ferrarius Common Weale iii. vii. f. 50 Therfore Aristotle compareth it, to the Lesbiane rule [L. Lesbiae normae], pliable to all measures.
1605 T. Tymme tr. J. Du Chesne Pract. Chymicall & Hermeticall Physicke ii. ii. 111 The composition and wonderful nature thereof is, as it were, a certaine example and Lesbian rule [L. regula Lesbia] of our worke.
a1628 J. Preston New Covenant (1630) 233 Thou goest not by a straight rule, but by a leaden Lesbian rule.
1711 W. King tr. G. Naudé Polit. Considerations Refin'd Politicks v. 188 It [sc. artificial, politic Justice] is soft and pliant enough to accommodate itself as the Lesbian rule [Fr. la regle Lesbienne] to human and popular weakness.
1828 A. Herbert Nimrod I. iv. 279 If the parallelogram called jugerum be enclosed by a rope, or any other Lesbian rule, that rope must be bent at the angle B, to make the two sides AB and BC; but if the flexible rule be again straightened out, it will give the line ABC.
1856 Christian Remembrancer Oct. 504 The Lesbian rule, which had been unduly stretched in one direction, has suddenly collapsed in another.
2010 Oxf. Jrnl. Legal Stud. 30 99 It is necessary to be flexible, to adopt a lesbian rule, and rather than conforming the visual figures to the words, judgment can endeavour instead to adapt the words to the images that surround and subtend them.
lesbian square n. rare after 17th cent. a measuring square which adapts to fit what is being measured (chiefly in figurative contexts); see Lesbian rule n.
1603 S. Daniel Panegyrike sig. C3 Equitie..is that Lesbian square, that building fit, Plies to the worke, not forc'th the worke to it.
1608 J. Sylvester tr. G. de S. Du Bartas Deuine Weekes & Wks. (new ed.) ii. iv. 72 Another, leueld by the Lesbian Squire, Deep vnder ground (for the Foundation) ioynes Wel-polisht Marble.
1613 R. N. Christians Manna i. iv. 24 They measure their faith by the Lesbian Square of their Sense.
1681 Democritus Ridens No. 3. (single sheet) (verso)/2 He is made as crooked as a Lesbian Squire.
2005 M. Fortier Culture of Equity iv. 112 Equity uses the lesbian square so that it ‘Plies to the worke’.
Reflections on Guided Meditations or Bobcat Logic for Meditation Hesitancy
Oct. 2, 2021
How can you be a better friend to yourself?
Behave in a manner that demonstrates trusting myself.
Oct. 4, 2021
What little things in life can you extend gratitude towards today?
The little black squirrel Pasquale, outside my window.
Oct. 23, 2021
List your unique qualities. How do you honour them?
Share my stories and thoughts. Learn from everyone and everything. Pursue truth knowing that she cannot be “caught” but that her light can help me walk with dignity.
Oct. 25, 2021
Who has changed your perspective recently? How?
My daughter-in-law. Increased my awareness of the effect of negatively polarized thought and expression upon the material world, something I knew but had allowed myself to stop being diligent to avoid.
Oct. 29, 2021
What opportunities are waiting for you outside your comfort zone?
To publish a book.
Oct. 30, 2021
What part of your reality can you meet with more acceptance?
I am growing older. I am.
Oct. 31, 2021
What parts of yourself are you hiding from the world? Why?
My suffering from being neurodivergent. I was trained to be like the majority from childhood.
Nov. 1, 2021
What expectations are you ready to let go of? Why?
That the answer is “out there” somewhere. From now, going forward, may I be content with a direction and a potential and find joy in those two treasures.
Nov. 4, 2021
What do you value about your mindfulness practice?
It uncovers my humanity.
Nov. 6, 2021
Do you consider yourself a good listener? Why or why not?
No. I am always talking.
Nov. 11, 2021
What gifts in your life do you often take for granted?
Health.
Nov. 13, 2021
How does it feel to be kind to those around you?
It feels dignified.
Nov. 20, 2021
How can you invite more play into your life?
Visit my new grand-daughter!
Nov. 21, 2021
What tiny choice will you make today that could have a big impact?
Allow myself to grow at my own pace. Tiny choice: Trying things again without criticism dialogues.
Nov. 23, 2021
Where in your schedule can you create pockets of rest today?
Afternoon nap.
Nov. 24, 2021
Where do you tend to overindulge in unhelpful ways?
Eating sweets. Regarding erotica. Work. Inertia. Remembrance.
Nov. 25, 2021
Count your blessings. What are you thankful for today?
My wife, cat, home, mountains, river, trees, my neighbours, my health, my family, all my three wives (2 ex), my little Mitsubishi, my wood stove, my blog readers, my doctors, my wife’s doctors, emergency personnel, my First Nations neighbours, my heritage, my experiences, Jeff Warren, Tamara Levitt, Calm©, St. Melangell, the Spirit That Moves In All Things... Why?, Well, I just am.
Nov. 26, 2021
Describe a time when you felt peaceful and open.
When I first encountered the Welsh triple-harp as played by Llio Rhydderch and ever since, by only thinking of the melodies.
Nov. 27, 2021
When you look up at the sky, how does it make you feel?
I feel a hint of the over-arching intent running through the play of substance, sentience and potential. I feel the universe attaining self-awareness through my flesh. I feel keenly the mystery of constant change on a scale of space and time so vast it appears to deny itself. In the cobalt of a fair day, I think of the St’at’imx word, kwaz-kwaz and I feel it is the correct term. I feel my night is another person’s day. I think of a lady in Spain who told me of two kind of birds. One with no feet and one with no wings. When I look at the moon, I feel whoever is also regarding it at the same time. When I look at the Pleiades, I feel my maternal grandmother’s Cherokee people.
Nov. 28, 2021
If you asked a friend, what would they say makes you great?
My desire to share. My candour. My versatility. My stories. My creativity. My endurance. My integrity. My insights and ability to commit them to paper. My loyalty.
Nov. 29, 2021
How is your state of mind impacting you today?
I am coping with my wife’s leukemia better than I would have before starting mindfulness training. I am coping better with everything than before and I am beginning to see and appreciate my own goodness and that of so many around me. I am thankful.
Nov. 30, 2021
Describe different characters/voices in your head.
A street-wise black boy.
A mystical Swede.
A superior German.
A wise Cherokee woman.
A poetic Celt.
An old Chinese hermit.
A cowboy.
A proud French woman.
Note: Not a comprehensive list, rather, an historical list that has diminished over the years and is getting less crowded as I practise mindfulness. Most are caregivers and family and a few are from books. My goal would be to let the harmful ones sink into my lake from my active refusal to attach to them. Aspects of myself that are stunted or wounded that are willing and capable to mature will be kept as honoured guests along with those that wish to honestly nurture me and I will notice their council as parts of a whole that shall be me. I do not know if a total cessation of inner voices ever occurs or if it is desirable but I would hope that a dynamic synthesis of curated inner voices may be obtained by those willing to do the work so that one may experience them as OSVOTUS. One sane voice of the unfolding self. (smile)
Dec. 1, 2021
Who can you offer some kindness to today? How?
I asked my wife’s doctor about how she and her own family were doing during the current state of emergency here in British Columbia where we all live, during her telephone appointment.
Well, you get the idea by now. Bless your own walk and may we all attain a healthy relationship between our most wise but fragile bodies and our ever foolish but indispensable minds.
far from fin