My Mentor said seeing you will not see and hearing you will not hear. I have long known that
we are other than what we seem. When the veil was lifted for our middle son David and he saw what was his to see , he asked of me, how long have you been dodging us? And I knew who he saw looking at me and said to him, all my life David, all my life. And he asked how I could go on living when I knew what I knew. I answered in three words, Tresy, David and John. You three grew beneath my heart and if I had taken the hand offered, you would be motherless. Tempted I was because of disappointment, but commitment had no options. Responsibility came with human skin.
That space in time left shortly when he did and I never asked him, to my regret, who he saw. I took a poetry manuscript called Cactus Jesus and the New Wine to an English professor to review when David died in ’85. When I went to collect it, I met the professor’s fury with what he called me, an anarchist. Not pleased, he said instead of lifting man up, I brought the gods down to where I was. No one, he said angrily, had ever done that to his knowledge.
Today, having just been home less than 48 hours from an Emergency Room visit, I was looking for previous work on we become what we feed our mind. Coming across the journal entry of March 27, ’95 are the scribed words,
‘yield to the knowledge as it embraces and fits you snugly as your skin does. When what you sieved and savored gives way to a broader knowledge and grants long life to you, when you bring the gods to where you are, you are then home. You can live then where you are when you realize what you have done. You brought the gods to where you are and no one does that without knowing what it is they do.’
What must be taught sometimes is bought at high cost. Did I know of the isolation, the rejection, the misunderstanding, and not having anyone willing to have me lean, however momentarily? I did not but learn I did. In spades.
I wanted to give my sons knowledge of love on this Earth and that life itself was sacred in all dimensions and must be guarded specifically. I wanted them to know this and the only way for me to teach was to be the example of this surety. My only thought was to learn and be what I wanted them to see. That it would take almost a hundred years was not in my frame of thought.
That it was the food of my days and nights, I now see. What we feed our minds is what we become. I am tired. I kept uppermost in mind that I did not want my sons searching for explanations of my behavior to those they respected. I wish we had laughed more because there was much fun. And the hours spent talking after dinner were great reward. We become what we feed our minds.
To truly choose to ignore what is presented on the mind’s screen is ethical suicide. I could not live with it. Could you?