Trusting Self (Jim)

If I Cannot Trust Myself 1/12/2006

On 11/03/2005 I wrote an entree entitled ‘Do I Trust God’. Though I struggle with the exact nature of this God I’m called to surrender to, I do trust her. I ended with the prayer of Thomas Merton, saying that I have no idea where I’m going, nor if I’m following your will (God), but I believe my desire to please you does please you. That if I do this you will lead me right, and I’m never alone. That aspect of Step Two of CODA was most difficult, for me.

The most difficult aspect of Step Three, asks ... ‘If I cannot trust myself, how can I trust Higher Power?’ ‘How do I practice trusting?’

I told my family, I read two gay romances over Christmas, “Brokeback Mountain” and ‘The Front Runner”. Both about honesty and integrity. Both deal with the high costs of being real and visible in the world (death) and of the even higher costs of not.

Ty said and has always said, that he believes I deserve better (than him). I guess I feel the same thing with anyone and all.

Billy Sive in “The Front Runner” was such a purist, only having sex with someone he loved. The coach, his lover, of course, a former prostitute, was not so pure, but was burned pure by the heat of their relationship. He took the heat.

Ty’s never been faithful yet his heat is real. What I mean is I sincerely believe he deeply feels his faults, and failures, and bleeds profusely for them. He’s not a cold and flat antisocial, for manipulations sake, rather his failures rooted, I think, in a lack of trust in himself. There’s an attachment to his faults and failures in that it fits him, he truly believes. That’s sad, so sad.

Does all this relate to how I practice trusting or don’t? I don’t know what to do with Ty and perhaps it’s why I’m so tired and driven to redeem myself right now. How can I be so cruel, untouched by his tears? Is that trusting myself? I understand his attachment to failure. I surely do. I’m far from pure myself. There’s heat together and separate for each of us, but which is purifying here? Being separate has been, but is it now? I’m pretty attached to self-sabotage myself.

I hear no answers from my sweet Lord. I really want to see you, Lord. Mmmm my Lord. I really want to know you, go with you, show you, see you Lord, be with you, my sweet Lord - Alleluia! Mmmmm my Lord - Hara Kristna. But it takes so long, my Lord. My sweet Lord. My, my, my, my Lord. My sweet Lord.

I hurt.

Dreams (Jim)

Dreams 01/12/2006

Saturday, I went to CODA and during check-in I said, ‘Hi, I’m Jim and I’m co-dependent, and I feel great but I’m not sure I believe it, at all.’ The whole room cracked up. Five minutes later, I leapt up and fled the room. A whole bucket of phlegm was pouring down my throat, my eyes were watering, and I couldn’t breathe. I ran out into the hall and hacked and hacked. I had to get outside, breathe and cough deeply. Then it was over. I blew my nose and felt great.

I mention it because it seems like a physical prelude of now. I write and tell everyone, like I told CODA, how wonderful everything is and it seems so, but then I have bad dream after bad dream and just want to sleep. I’m irritable, tired and driven at work and home. So I sleep and exercise a lot.

Here’s the dreams...


The Shaft 01/10/2006

My young son has just came in the door from school, with a black eye, he says from a pool stick. As he closes the door, I see on it behind him, a picture of a bloody pool stick butt and him with his black eye. So I know it’s intentional, a warning for me to not to try to get out of the mafia, or my family will pay.

We have a pool table, so I talk my son into playing, watching his reaction as I hand him the stick. There is none and I’m relieved. So far he’s still innocent, untraumatized, he doesn’t know the ramifications, but I do. It must stay so. I’ll play the game so there’s no more trouble for my kid.


The Bottomless Pit 01/11/2006

At work I’m on the fork lift, carrying two bundles of plywood, so that I can’t see in front of me, as I drive. I take them down a ramp, that reminds me of the manure pit at the dairy farm, I worked at as a kid, where we collected it all as we scraped the lot each morning, before spreading the shit on the fields. As I near the end of the lot and begin to set the lumber down, I hear co-workers behind it, shrieking for me to stop. I panic and drive on another twenty or thirty feet and then drop a bucket attached to the fork, accidentally, down a bottomless hole, but stop in time to not fall in myself.

A meeting is called to discuss me. A co-worker asks me what I was feeling - I tell her it was none of her damn business, that I don’t answer to her. My boss puts me on restriction, saying they have to be wary with me, when I’m so tired, for my own and everyone’s protection.


Okay I’ll Jump (For the Thrill of It) 01/12/2006

I step out of my shower and notice a chunky black man in my linen closet. I assume it’s the maid, but I don’t have one, so I follow him to the kitchen, where a company party is beginning. I ask, who invited them, since this is a private residence. They laugh me off.

I head out for lunch myself, to meet up with a coworker, but first swing past Piedmont Park. The trees are unnaturally clipped and flattened on top and huge dung piles surround the trails leading into the park. Street people and sex desperados crowd the trails. In a meeting building I talk with a hospice worker, and try to join in with them as we head across the park. Someone hits a ball my way though and calls me to throw it back. I throw like a sissy and it only goes half way, hits something, and rolls back to me. I throw it pathetically again, shrug and leave, but now I’ve lost my acquantances.

Still trying to fit in, I take up the challenge to hang onto two strings and digging my heels in, ski back across the park. I think I’m a hero now, like some stunt rider. I’m heading right towards the meeting building and picking up speed. The strings go right through the wall. I don’t let go though. I jump into the air and hit the building with both feet. I’m unscathed, and damn proud of myself, only no one’s noticed. No one’s noticed.

Jungs Frightening Revelation (Jim)

Jung’s Frightening Revelation 01/08/2006

When I spoke of my mystic experiences in the piece called ‘God’s Will’, last week, I described my vision of a 60' phallus on the alter, that arose as I tried to hold onto my sense of desire while in worship in church. I wondered which message was correct, that it arose in the first place because my desire was dangerously out of control as lust, or that it went away after confronting me, because God condoned my desire?

Jung struggled mightily over this very same vision in a dream, while a boy of just three or four years old. Of it he says, ‘I had the earliest dream I can remember - a dream which was to preoccupy me all my life.’ He drempt that in a big meadow, near a vicarage, there was a rectangular stone-lined hole in the ground, with a stairway leading down. At the bottom behind a heavy, sumptuous green curtain, he saw a rectangular chamber thirty feet long, with an arched ceiling of hewn stone. In the center, a red carpet ran from the entrance to a low platform, which had a wonderfully rich golden throne on it. Something was standing on it, perhaps a tree trunk 12 to 15 feet high and about one and half to two feet thick, except that it was made of skin and naked flesh, At the top it had a rounded head with no face and no hair, and on the very top was a single eye gazing upward. Above it was an aura of brightness. From outside he heard his mother’s voice call out then, “Yes, look at him. That is the man-eater.”

Only decades later did he understand that it was a ritual phallus. He interprets the dream thus.
Jung as a boy feared Jesuits, in their black robes and hats, with shadowed faces. His mothers words thus mean, to him, either that the phallus and not Jesus and Jesuits are the devourer of little boys, or that Jesus and Jesuits and the phallus are one and the same. The hole represents a grave. The grave itself is an underground temple, and the curtain is the meadow (the mystery of Earth with her covering vegetation). The carpet was blood red. He doesn’t know how he conjured an anatomically correct erect phallus. But the urethrae as an eye, with light above it, comes from the word phallus which means shining, bright. This phallus is a subterranean god, not to be named.

Lord Jesus, thus from that point on, became for him, never quite real, acceptable or loved, because of his underground counter-part. A frightening revelation! Lord Jesus became in some ways a god of death, of crucified and bloody corpses. Jesus’s love and kindness hence appeared doubtful. Jung could never overcome this secret mistrust from then on. Jesus and God, sat on a much more beautiful throne far, far away in the blue sky, with golden crowns and white robes, but from this same Jesus came the dark Jesuit robed in black women’s garb, associated with a very different throne, and something non-human and underworldly that fed on human flesh. Fifty years later he also realized that the motif of cannibalism underlies the symbolism of the Mass.

Finally Jung realized how unchild-like and sophisticated the dream and it’s message was for a three year old to have, and wondered “Who was it speaking to me?” “Who brought the Above and the Below together, and laid the foundation for everything that was to fill the second half of my life?” Jung sees this dream thus as an initiation into the realm of darkness, and as the unconscious beginning of his intellectual life.

Wasn’t it the same for Adam and Eve? Having eaten from the forbidden tree of Knowledge, their innocent naivete spoiled, revealing a secret mistrust of God.

Dream (Jim)

Dreams 01/04/2006

Wednesday, January 4th, 2006 - (Miraculous)
“The Three Preachers”

A fundamentalist preacher is both sneered at and envied, by a Catholic priest and an MCC minister.

The fundamentalist preacher stands in the very kitchen of his converts life, a room in which we, three times a day, appease one of our most basic needs, to eat. So the fundamentalist is intimately involved in the preparation, planning and dicing and seasoning and searing, of the sustenance for the converts needs, be they relational, financial or spiritual. They together make the difficult changes the convert needs to make for themself.

The other two preachers envy the fundamentalist because he’s at the molten core of their calling with another, but they sneer because he’ll be burned up by it, since he’s far too close, with barely any distinction between himself and the convert.

I usually view fundamentalists as right in spirit but as out of context. The context it was meant for has no bearing on intent or message for them, it’s all about them and about now, as if other times and other people are all alike, with no distinctions, and no separation. Out of context can be abhorrently wrong, however.

Out of context, and with no distinction between self and other, I certainly can dole out all power till depleted, and powerless. As such, I think the dream is a warning, to not lose myself to other, indiscriminately.

How am I the three preachers? I sympathize with all three perspectives, the insiders thrill, the outsiders envy, and the sneer. Perhaps the three types of preachers also represent two progressions, similar to my own path, from most rigid, to most liberal, and from the early all-consuming thrill, to the middle time away, to now a more discriminating time.

Final Assignment (Jim)

Final Assignment 01/08/2005

“Write a one paragraph description of a scene, from real life, that encapsules your writing block.”

I am 13, and fooling around in bed with Mickey, in my upstairs bedroom. We’ve been up there about an hour, when all the sudden my Mom walks in on us. I wanted to be up in my room, in the bright light of day, in my own space, because I was tired of the hiding, the cliffs, woods and his basement. We probably could have continued in his basement undetected much longer.

The look I remember on my Mom’s face was one of complete horror, and then utter rejection. My Mom was so central to my life at that time. I carried the image in my mind, and the conclusion, that I had lost her love, never to regain it, well into my 40's. I can only compare the loss to a child that loses a parent, who then blames themself for their death, whether they are the actual cause or not. A lot of very traumatic things occurred after that, but nothing touches the impact of the horror on her face. After that I didn’t care what happened to me.

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Cliff asked how this scene relates to my writers block. It does because I feel if I fully go after what I really want (in my own space, in the full light of day) I will lose everything.

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I did not reenact this scene however when we sculpted a scene in group that captured our writers block. Instead I tried to depict the typical scene at the supper table, where I sit on one side of Dick, with Tom sitting on the other side of him, and we are jabbing our elbows into his sides. Dick is drawn in as tightly in on himself as possible, hardly able to eat. My Dad stands behind me with his belt off and raised above his head, ready to strike me.

I don’t want you to think my Dad abused us, however. I remember once he threatened to hit me with a belt and followed through on it a few times, but not many, because it had no effect on me, except to intensify my hatred, and my determination to not yield. I’d yell, ‘you can hit me but you can’t touch me no matter what you do, so go ahead, hit me.’ It is the image I remember though.

The group did not realize from the sculpture however that Dad’s wrath was directed solely on me. I drew it down on me, and provoked it. They imagined Tom as a sadistic bully, but really he was more just the alpha male, always demonstrating his dominance. For the group, the main point however was that the focus of the scene was not me at all but on Dick. I said I did that because I felt more like Dick in the scene than me. Which is my craziness. I always concern myself with other over self, losing myself in other.

When I lose myself so in others, due to self rejection (seeing Mom’s contempt), I’m rudderless. In a reoccurring dream I had for years, at near forty years old, I am in a sports car, mashing the accelerator to the floor, hurling forward with my eyes shut.

Losing myself in other was the whole point of dating John Renkin in Chattanooga. I’d go there to live his life instead of mine, to be him. When I’d return, days later, I could barely remember what I was doing, at work, or home. What was important to me. It was lost in the swirling mist. John had been more real to me that I was to myself. My life and person was like a dream, quickly fading from memory, once awake.

I had to break off the relationships with Ty and Scott when I could no longer take care of myself, because I was so wrapped up in them.