Building a Fence

I'm pondering the nature of love again.
At least, I'm pondering how I experience love and what it means to me. I don't know how anyone is supposed to ponder anything except through their own experience. We can always try to put ourselves in other people's shoes, walk a mile in their moccasins as it were, but in the end our understanding is limited.

I know that the world has big problems like wars and famine and AIDS and genocide. And America has troubles with the economy and health care and rampant consumerism, materialism, etc. etc. etc. There are important worries in my own living room, too. For the moment, though, the lights are on and cupboard is full which means I can ponder the nature of love, how I experience it and what it means to me.

I'm still a bit perplexed about how Buzz Kill fits into all of this and can only conclude it has something to do with what Marion Woodman says about penetration in Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride. We all know about physical penetration when you have sex - but being penetrated physically is inconsequential if your soul isn't penetrated. You can use the term Consciousness or Self interchangeably with Soul since to me it's all the same. Foma if you listen to Bokonon. Lies all Lies. I don't really believe that, more's the pity, although I am willing to concede that this earthly existence is all we'll ever know.

Naturally, it all comes back to the latest salvo with HCW, that exciting, difficult man who penetrated my soul. I feel like Luke Skywalker insisting in the face of all the wisdom in the world that Good lives inside Darth Vader. There are any number of ways to interpret a situation where someone who said he wants nothing to do with you reads your blog regularly for four months. My hairdresser, Max the Genius, says that since the individual in question is a man, we can never forget that there may be no meaning behind his actions at all whatsoever. I will accept that he himself may not have given his actions a second thought, but that doesn't make the actions totally meaningless.

All I can say is that when somebody knows that your statcounter registers every click anyone makes on a page and continues to click away, he's trying to tell you something even if he doesn't know what he's trying to say.

G*d knows I don't know what to make of it. Having a lot of time on my hands right now as a result of my unfortunate employment status, I've given the matter more than ample consideration. In the course of this contemplation, I remembered the what the shrink in the looney bin had to say about my Rorshach results. The first thing you do in a Rorschach test is look at the blots and say what you see. Then you go back over the blots and describe in more detail for the shrink exactly what you saw and how you came to see it. We learned that sometimes I focus on one specific portion of the blot, excluding everything around it.

Of the ten blots in the Rorschach, I only showed this tendency once or twice, but shrinks will make a big deal of out things like that. I figure it all goes to prove that we all make choices and decisions based on our own experience and imagination in order to make sense, or meaning, of the world. Ergo: we think what we like to think at any given moment.

Right now, I like to think HCW's visits have to do with the last part of a song that seems to resonate endlessly for any number of people: Suzanne, by Leonard Cohen.

And the sun pours down like honey
On our lady of the harbour
And she shows you where to look
Among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed
There are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love
And they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds the mirror

Sometimes when you look into that mirror, you may not like what you see - but that doesn't make it any more or less real than when you're pleased with your reflection. I'm not so worried about my own reflection because, as Popeye says, "I yam what I yam and that's all that I yam." When I'm attached to someone, I'll continue to believe the best even though it might seem sensible to give up. That's how it is when you're a person who claps for fairies. To me, HCW is another child leaning out for love - as are we all - and I must have touched him somehow or he wouldn't have been swimming about in my writing.

When someone looks into your eyes to find himself mirrored there, there are times when you have to reflect back an uncomfortable vision that acts like a fence built to protect your own vulnerabilities. I've never been a fan of fences, but as trusting as I am by nature, I am not naive. Vulnerable, definitely, and I'm okay with that.

All the Fairy Tales suggest that a real prince will not be deterred for long by walls of thorns. My mother has been trying to tell me for years to consider the possibility that Prince Charming will never come. In real life, princes come and go, and some are more charming than others. Granny the Ho, with five husbands and an unknown number of boyfriends, could have testified to that. She would tell me to keep wishing on that star and asking the goddess to help me find joy no matter what tomorrow brings.