Linda's Hearth Indulgence: A MentalScape

Writing And Talking and Using Words, Sustaining Our Social Being


I am a writer, tho' more often barren than dancing in the glen with Muses who favor me,  or with saintly channeled  visions, these days.  It's just one of the reasons I think about language and words. I like to play in the sand castles of our shared chat. It takes me an effort, a whole discipline, to mentally step beyond the sandbox or the shoreline to hear -- and share -- more distant drummers' singing. Maybe I can  experiment with putting words to wordless or abandoned thoughts?

I produce this blog, this scrapbook partly to remind myself about hearth,threshold, the well; the place, structure, capacity for life that folds so sleekly between personal and social. Domesticity as spiritual necessity and as buffering for the inevitable schizophrenia stalking us between inside life and outside life.


I.  BEYOND WORDS

When I lose my language grip altogether, and am finally ready to "recover", I return to France's great actor and writer Antonin Artaud.

When I can't cheer myself up or find safe ways to get lost in internal passions, I reach for Louise Hay, once a lifesaving gift from my daughter. A little Will Rogers can help, too.

When I start feeling as tho' I know what I believe or where I belong, I make myself read something thoughtful and intelligible which I disagree with ~ never easy for me, yet necessary for my 'mental health', should I care to be around other humans. These are three mere "steps", and the steps significant choices.

A great part of my nature, perhaps essence, ascribes to dealing with life in words and language, to engage socially and strive for general transparency. But it is not a necessary part; one can also commune with plants and trees, with or without a "green thumb," and still be perfectly, humanly, effectively, whole.  And still be "sane", regardless what others believe. Ultimately, it is our choice -- each one of us, AND all of us together --  choosing to live in social human groupings, even sometimes 'subhuman groups' as in Haiti right now because of our shared neglect.

We are taught social engagement denotes a level of maturity. I choose to believe it illistrates a particular facet or realm of maturity rather than a necessary rung or hierarchal tier.

Seems sometimes we can feel so pushed into being a socially engaged human, and it can seem so utterly enforced, coerced, pre-ordained. Such a state comes to feel not authentic or not of our co-creating? Then we may cease to thrive, then begin to die. There are so many "preset" agreements and conditions for social engagement we may even forget we are also Earthlings, we are animals too, we belong to Grandfather Fish and Grandmother Herb as much as any ancestors. and we ultimately belong to The Eternal.

Spiritually, this human realm does not really have to be "Hotel California." We CAN check out from social conscription systems; we can step out of role bondage and economies. (Well, almost. I couldn't do it if I were a nursing mother unless wealthy enough to have a beloved wet nurse handy. I may be wrong tho'?) I understand that the incredible doctor Carl Jung did exactly this -- step out of language and it's precepts -- at the end of his days?

And it turns out, often the consequences are not as difficult, not as obscene or risky as we are taught to expect, less painful than a hangover or consecutive bad dreams.

II.  When words spook you, SPOOK THEM BACK!

Wrestle with them as tho' they have their own mouths, own elbows, own angst. I need to overcome my very "excellent" proofreading learned skills (when not on FB or sugar obviously) in order to regain my sense of the flavorous, melodious, sometimes multiple dimensionality of the "small" words we all use. Journalistic proofreading is all about efficiency. "Efficiency" is kinda like "housekeeping" in a way.

Yet when "I am" a writer, I don't want to be building composites. I want to be painting with watercolor words, igniting firecracker words, lisening for bird-whispers-downwind words. As if words were architecture, I want to be creating Falling Waters or the beauty of a red-n-yellow Japanese Maple tree, more often than 'Pleasantville' or tv's "The Honeymooners".