It has been some time since I wrote. I should write monthly, not quarterly. I am sorry.
One of the challenges is to find both energy and unimpeded opportunity in the presence of a host of competing urgent things. You are the important, whether or not you are urgent.
I feel like, in the past week or so, my mind and heart have gone from being a single core processor to a dual (or quad) core operating at higher rate. I am thinking better, and also feeling in color (without injections of testosterone). I have been thinking about how Jordan Peterson engages the bible as myth, in the sense of epic and deeply meaningful symbolic, and started processing through the question "what are the myths that made me". It feels like I am speaking the true name of myself, and each time I do it, I gain power and life.
Should I tell you about me? Should I tell you about you? I am doing something, intentionally, that Jordan said was a miracle some several thousand years ago: I am speaking to the future, trying to make a deal with the future. This future, unlike his example with the farmer and the grain, is outside my lifetime, but in yours. The question behind the question becomes, how can I give you a great gift that you can receive outside my lifetime, that you can realize? It is a game of catch, but what to throw?
The myths that made me are terrible. They are crushing.
My mother ran away from home as a pregnant teen in the early 1970's so that my grandfather could not drive/enforce her to abort me. She started running then and has been running since. I think it both made and broke her. She ran from her ex, moving every 3 months for years and years, because he had promised to kill us all, so there was a dangerous and damaging several decades there. For me I had to ask "did I destroy her life", "do I owe her a huge debt now". It set up a reliance when I was young that became much more of a codependency as a teen. It was healthy for me to move out of her home. It was healthy for me to walk, and stumble, and struggle under my own sometimes heavy burdens without her as the context. I have been, and will be, pro-life because it is too easy to put a crushing pressure on a teenage girl, to pressure her to abort the child. I think that pro-choice folks would get a lot less aggressive opposition if they could make sure it is the girls choice, and not someone forcing her to do it, like they force her to do other stuff. It feels like they have bought into their own binary narrative, when the world is more than "either-or". There are cases where the availability of abortion on demand enables more, much more, oppression than it eliminates.
I asked my grandfather, when I was in 6th grade, if he did that, if he pressured her to abort me, and if he really wanted me dead. He said his baby girl was in a scary and dangerous place, and he just wanted to help her. I saw in his face, that in my asking the question, he looked in some reverential fear at that moment toward the holy ground that he had transgressed when my mom was pregnant with me. He saw a piece of the terribleness, of the just consequences of his actions. He wished she had a different trajectory in life, but he had taken a presumptuous hand, he had committed the sin of hubris against something great, in what he had done.
If I write here, in this public forum, one that is searched and analyzed by many robots, by many actors, some of my other myths, then I will set myself up for harm. There are things that most folks simply cannot process. They have no capacity for thought in the domain, and only a pre-programmed response, and I can see that response from here. I would tell you some of the others, as I figure them out, but not the government(s), not the business entities (A,G), not the employers or potential employee analytics firms, have any right to know or use abuses that happened against me as a child as weapons against me or against you. They can't help themselves. I see the clusters and chains in how the algorithms candidate youtube videos, or feed posts at either facebook or linked in. The humans view through the broken lens of the machinery. That eye doesn't capably measure itself, so it can't self-diagnose, or self-improve.
Your lives are rich, and busy, and sometimes hard. There is, thank God, so far, very little in the way of terrible. The bears that mauled me, and your mom, you have not yet even seen them with your own eyes. I like to think that is protection, but not over-protection.
I am going to have to re-read "Letters from Dad" and try this again. I think that I have "departed from the way", though I didn't know it. I sincerely hope to try again at this, and get it right.
I love you. I delight in you. I admire you. You are the best of me. You make me delight to work hard, and try and enable and empower you in life. May you have a good and healthy life. May God make you great, and make your life meaningful. May your hearts be full of integrity, and may you do the best things. You are blessings to me. Thank you.
