Dark Night and Golden Dawn

Spo spoke of his dark night of the soul, one dreary year in medical school. Mine lasted a lot longer: pretty much from the time we moved to Florida at age ten until I graduated High School, college, came out and finally emerged from a software career to become a massage therapist and healer.

For me, the dark night (all three, almost four decades of it!) has been about not being congruent with my inner self, about not being honest, about not coming out of all of the closets that I've put myself in.

Why is it all about the fucking closets? Why do I even care what others might think of me? Jebus, but it seems like this life so far is all about "lifting the veils", about uncovering the real me and having the courage to reveal it to ... me.

At age nine I was blissfully happy, connected to the world around me and to my beloved Blue Ridge mountains of Asheville. At ten, I'd been reviled and rejected by a next door neighbor kid who, despite his morbidly obese and threatening, domineering ways, his attention I nevertheless craved. I'd candidly told him about my sex play with cousins (which was perfectly fun, pleasant, and ordinary to me), and I thought he'd have a coronary. In that moment, on that sidewalk on a sunny day in the mountains, the concept of "I am not OK as I am; therefore I need to be different somehow" entered my world. If that were true, what else about me needed to be hidden?

I took the safe route and hid everything.

We moved to Florida shortly after this, and I was plopped into an alien landscape: weird trees, strange-tasting water, sand everywhere, flat landscape, and ... Public School. It was summer of '72, Nadia Comenici was the Olympic star, and I was just absolutely miserable, completely adrift and unmoored from everything that was recognizable in my life. But not as miserable as I would soon become when school started. It was Hell, and I cried every single day before going to that awful dungeon that was Fifth Grade.

I began my campaign to Become Invisible, to Blend In and Not Be Seen, definitely never Wanting To Stick Out In A Crowd. Thus I shut my first of many closet doors. I developed this weird notion that if I was a Good Boy and Never Had Emotions, I would be OK and everything would turn out All Right. It seemed to work at least passably well for a few years, but there was always the occasional scrape, the occasional threat from a much bigger, more testosterone-laden guy, from someone seeing me "play with the girls", or ridiculing me for being in the show choir, for being in musicals, for excelling.

I SO did not want to be different, "special", or in any way noticeable. At ALL. I dressed in ways that didn't bring the light of attention. I wore boring shoes. It was sheer agony trying to figure out how to be the person "they" wanted me to be! I kept thinking I got it right only to make some big mistake and ...

But you know what? I'm quirky! I stick out! I'm built like a little gnome, a dwarf who is far stronger than his stature might suggest. I was never fast in gym, but was always very, very strong. I may not have been the smartest one in class, but I was frequently the cleverest, frequently the guy who saw through the smoke to get to the point. Even I missed the signs, myself. I stuck with an Electrical Engineering major looong after I should have given it up.

NOT listening to the still, small voice cost me much, but the lesson has eventually been driven home with much force: know thyself. You can't change the deep inner nature of "thyself", but you can own it all, love it all, cherish it all. And then start putting it to most excellent use! I was listening to Carolyn Myss' "Sacred Contracts" on CD the other day, and she said something about when we incarnate that our soul shatters into a thousand pieces, and that it's our job in this lifetime to earn our souls back by reclaiming it one piece at a time. This jarred me a little bit, because I felt that this was precisely what I've been doing in life lately: I've been on my Knight's Quest, out in the woods and completely off the beaten path searching for and finding (!) my own Holy Grail, myself.

When I finally started listening to that still, small voice inside of me again, life became Good once more. I am learning to embrace all these thousand parts of my soul, each of which gives me more and more clarity about who I am and about what my chosen mission in the world is. I think we can go ahead and rule out "ordinary citizen" ;-) since that sure as hell won't work. I've always known that I was a catalyst, an element that forever stays apart, aloof from a reaction, but that is nevertheless necessary for the reaction to take place. Inscrutable and also familiar.

I'm just me. Wildly, exotically, amazingly me. I feel like the staid
English character Sterling in the movie "Jeffrey" as he wraps
himself in a cape and looks at himself in the mirror and says "Is this
really me? Can I *do* this?"

To which I answer myself: yes :-) (You have to! You must. You know
this, deep down inside.)

I think I'm just going to be wildly, fascinatingly, amazingly, me. And to hell with all those tiny-minded people I went to school with.

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