How can you rebuild your own life after TAKING A LIFE (and destroying two families)?
THE GARDEN: Of my mind
In the end, we are self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages that are little miracles of self-reference. — Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop p.363
How can you rebuild your own life after TAKING A LIFE (and destroying two families)?
In the end, we are self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages that are little miracles of self-reference. — Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop p.363
The Paleo diet fad is all the rage, named for a period in which our progenitor were hunter/gatherers before farm or garden. Regardless of the bad dietary press, 10,000 years of agriculture now garners untold benefits to humanity (population growth, cities, and civilization itself). I contend that a GARDEN is good and should be reintroduced into the LIFE of the modern man. We have lost touch with Gaia at our own risk.
I focus here on the analogous PSYCHIC GARDEN (near to each human’s DELUSION HOUSE).
Humans seed and plant it with many accomplishment vegetables, happiness fruits and appreciate flowering plants. While flowers produce no food for humans, they attract complimenting pollinators to the GARDEN — necessary to fertilize those plants humans prize most — vegetables of accomplishment and fruits of happiness.
Each person plants and tends a GARDEN — whether they realize it or not. The ideal GARDEN is always in the front yard of a DELUSION HOUSE (unlike in the physical world where it tends to be in the back). Even if the SELF has a hedge, fence or wall (religion, race, class), the GARDEN can be seen by others. This is how it must be. GARDENS are meant to be displayed — both as evidence of good upbringing and a portent of what can come in future seasons for those that seek the shelter of the DELUSION HOUSE (family, friends, acquaintances).
While the flowers attract the complementing pollinators, the fruit and vegetables so produced are necessary to sustain LIFE (self-image).
Humans are intended to procreate. Thus, we share our sacred psychic GARDEN and DELUSION HOUSE with loving partners, MATES. Some are attracted to the flowers of compliments and appreciation. Others seek the protection of a sturdy hedge or the shade of a strong tree (solace in suffering, tragedy, and trial). Usually, they stay for the fruit and vegetables (evidence of society’s approval garnered in accomplishments of social circle and acquisitions of hearth and home). I know that was what keep me in my mate’s GARDEN after enjoying her glorious flowers (compliments and attention).
Little did I appreciate the risk I took. I left my GARDEN untended for longer and longer stretches of time. While it is true a well-manicured GARDEN can go untended, without determent, for periods, this was not the fate of mine. While it seemed my MATE’s GARDEN produced ample for us both, this was a risk. Over time, she found that my ever diminishing varietals lost their savor (“what are you doing with your career?”). I did not prune and pluck nor till and maintain the soil of my GARDEN as I should. While my GARDEN could still sustain LIFE (of SELF supplemented by a bounty from WIFE’s GARDEN), it did not steadily increase in abundance as our commercial society expects nay, demands.
My flowering plants attracted fewer and fewer pollinators and as a result, my fruit and vegetables diminished (Wow what are you doing these days?).
Give this lack of attention, my GARDEN’s production was stunted, bug-ravaged — less (“why is he so glum”).
We spent more and more time in MATE’s GARDEN, I became both admirer and pollinator of her GARDEN (not my purpose in life or our relationship) while enjoying the harvests of her fruit and vegetables — MATE did share everything.
But what of my GARDEN?
Too long untended, it could no longer provide the minimum my DELUSION HOUSE needed to keep my heart’s fire fed. No matter the love one shares with a MATE, we live in our own DELUSION HOUSE and always need a well-tended GARDEN if we are to survive.
Upon the destruction of my DELUSION HOUSE by FIRE (set by my very own hand), I awoke to realize my GARDEN was all that was left to demonstrate my membership in the community of humanity. As I surveyed the pitiful sun-baked soil of my GARDEN, I despaired. It had been greatly diminished before the FIRE and now appeared a waste-land alongside the still-smoldering ruin of my psychic marriage DELUSION HOUSE. I had no real HOUSE, yet to survive I needed to rebuild both the shelter of a psychic delusion HOUSE and the production of a GARDEN.
What could I plant?
Did the soil remember my hand?
Would it soften for the water to be absorbed and ready the loam of the land to support new life?
Where there dormant seeds awaiting my touch, water, and sun to burst forth?
Should I purchase the common varietals of OTHERS (priest, professors, sponsors, and psychologists)?
I would plant my own!
I must explore the wilds near and far. In the labyrinth of my LIFE, I seek secret troves of SEEDs to replant my GARDEN. Like video game EASTER EGGS, they are hidden.
Now I hunt them, plant them, nurture them, to survive.
This is a long solitary journey I have taken. In my mind, I have had to build new conceptual frames to survive this journey. I have divided this journey/work up into such conceptual frames as destruction and rebuilding of my PSYCHIC DELUSION HOUSE, LETTER TO MY YOUNGER SELF AND ALWAYS THE FIRE. Much more is to come on how I have learned on this journey.
As set out in German existential philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s masterwork, Beyond Good and Evil, The impulse to knowledge is not the “father of philosophy’ and presentation of philosophy but “a confession of faith on the part of its author, and a type of involuntary and unself-conscious memoir.” I find this true of my musing as well….
Free of the twin distractions of mobility and community, I spent my time pondering deep concepts — one was survival on the Main Line in an infamously famous and brutal prison, San Quentin.
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