In an earlier post I played at visualizing cold wet weather and mud as medicine. Not only does it postpone the wildfire season later into June, when the monsoons are only a couple weeks away, but it also rebuilds a healthy appreciation for sunshine in your own mind. Depending on where you live, you might not need any help in appreciating sunshine; but a gringo in the arid western states certainly needs help.
And Mother Nature is at it again. When cabin fever reaches a crescendo, you can fight back, but don't fight back too soon: there is an art to enjoying a miserable day. Your rebound is robbed of its glory if it isn't prepared by a nadir. Artificial aids are permitted: consider watching the first five minutes of the latest "Jane Eyre" movie, the one with the faint lighting and the haunting score by Dario Marianelli.
It is quite amazing how tuned in you can get to the amperage and voltage of your solar controller. Even doing pushups on a muddy trailer floor brings instant relief.
But even better, slap on some rubber-bottomed mudder boots and take the dog frolicking in wet snow and mud. People who have never had a dog might not realize how medicinal it is to watch your dog enjoying the very thing that you think has got you down.
Yesterday I would go for short walks during the day's more-lucid moments. Once I was walking through the forest and doing my best to fight the anxiety of hope, but usually losing. Then I looked down to the grass and saw the faintest shadow of my own body. There is an exquisite point when you are torn between reality and your own imagination.
I want the shadow to be objectively real. I don't want to bounce around in the prison-confines of my own mind. That is just another type of cabin fever. And yet, Reality is such a bitch goddess at times, leaving the Imagination as the most effective tool.
So, am I getting a bit crazy to attach so much importance to a barely visible shadow? Let's look as some of the usual symptoms of insanity. There is nothing destructive or unhealthy about this pleasure. It is also quite practical: the trailer batteries need to get charged up.
In fact, to doubt one's sanity in this example is really just confusing Sanity with mere Conventionality. Look at what a huge industry scenery-tourism is. Do people think it is necessary to squander vast sums of money to appreciate nature? If so, it is because they visualize nature, beauty, and pleasure as objects to be consumed, hopefully in an ostentatious or bourgeois-respectable way.
They would be better off to stay home and enjoy the miracle of gardening, help their dog deliver a litter of squirming puppies, or look for faint shadows on a cloudy day.
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| What Southwestern weather is supposed to be like, in May and June. |
It is quite amazing how tuned in you can get to the amperage and voltage of your solar controller. Even doing pushups on a muddy trailer floor brings instant relief.
But even better, slap on some rubber-bottomed mudder boots and take the dog frolicking in wet snow and mud. People who have never had a dog might not realize how medicinal it is to watch your dog enjoying the very thing that you think has got you down.
Yesterday I would go for short walks during the day's more-lucid moments. Once I was walking through the forest and doing my best to fight the anxiety of hope, but usually losing. Then I looked down to the grass and saw the faintest shadow of my own body. There is an exquisite point when you are torn between reality and your own imagination.
I want the shadow to be objectively real. I don't want to bounce around in the prison-confines of my own mind. That is just another type of cabin fever. And yet, Reality is such a bitch goddess at times, leaving the Imagination as the most effective tool.
So, am I getting a bit crazy to attach so much importance to a barely visible shadow? Let's look as some of the usual symptoms of insanity. There is nothing destructive or unhealthy about this pleasure. It is also quite practical: the trailer batteries need to get charged up.
In fact, to doubt one's sanity in this example is really just confusing Sanity with mere Conventionality. Look at what a huge industry scenery-tourism is. Do people think it is necessary to squander vast sums of money to appreciate nature? If so, it is because they visualize nature, beauty, and pleasure as objects to be consumed, hopefully in an ostentatious or bourgeois-respectable way.
They would be better off to stay home and enjoy the miracle of gardening, help their dog deliver a litter of squirming puppies, or look for faint shadows on a cloudy day.
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Comments
Seems like that's the thought that is an accepted belief at this point and will always cause eventual disappointment. One can seek escape through spending money or through one's imagination which costs nothing but still has the same result....infatuation.
Observing the mind is an interesting thing. It is always active, always engaged in some occupation and usually flooded with one emotion after another. Where does it all come from? To simply accept these various occurrences as some sort of truth is to miss the point.
We are programmed, are we not, in some fashion, and our whole human experience is simply the program playing?
But there does seem to be a little part in there separate from the programming. Something that can observe the programming playing.
So, if reality is a bitch goddess, it is only because one has refused to acknowledge that the program is just a program and that there is indeed something separate in there that can witness it all. This part observes our judgments but does not participate in them.
Jim
I try to be a positive and corrective influence on that culture.