ant-herding.

That’s what writing is like. It’s like there’s an ant farm in my head and I have to herd them into their pens. Ooo that was poetic I think Midnight is a ripe time for creativity perhaps.

Speaking of poetic-ness, I have this line from a poem running through my head, “cloths of heaven, cloths of heaven.” Only I don’t know if it’s from this poem by Yeats or something else.

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

“Welcome, fellow dreamers. Take off your shoes and enter”

I would say this to my classroom if I ever became a hippy English teacher.

Anyway. The concept “cloths of heaven” reminds me of the feeling I have very often of yearning to escape the boundaries of normalcy and reach something… transcendent.

Yet here I am at the hair salon, talking about the weather patterns.

Transcendental!

I’ve been reading this book by Joseph Cambell, have you heard of him? He was a professor of mythology. He said the mystery of life is beyond what we can comprehend: everything we know is within the boundaries of being and not being, good and evil, true and untrue, etc. We always think in terms of opposites. But the transcendent things like God and eternity go beyond these binary opposites.

He says “myths” bridge that gap…

What myth does for you is to point beyond the phenomenal field toward the transcendent. A mythic figure is like the compass that you used to draw circles and arcs in school, with one leg in the field of time and the other in the eternal. The image of a god may look like a human or animal form, but its reference is transcendent of that.

Myth is metaphor, and there have been tons of myths in every age in every culture, and they all have similar themes (such as the snake and the woman = rebirth). But I’m coming to see that these myths aren’t really meant to be taken literally. Heaven is a metaphor. Reincarnation is a metaphor. Heaven is a higher state of being, and to get there you have to purge yourself of “sins,” or things that might hold you back. The reincarnation metaphor serves as a reminder that what goes around comes around, and doesn’t necessarily mean that if you’re a jerk in this life you’ll be a dung-beetle in the next.

Anyway, Cambell says we’ve taken our current myth from past myths, not only are they no longer applicable, but we take them literary when they’re mostly metaphors. (Jonah and the whale? an angry God who floods the whole earth, even children, to purge it from evil?). Our global society needs a new consciousness or myth, or something, or rituals like the initiation into manhood that Native Americans used to do– It’s all pretty deep and confusing, and really I don’t get half the stuff he’s talking about, but I’ll give you the sum of my thoughts as far as relating to my personal sphere of experience.

I’ve been thinking. My whole life has been this search for a “higher way” of living. But maybe this ideal, perfect pathway, “the” meaning of existence… doesn’t exist. Maybe I’ve been driving myself crazy trying to find this path that isn’t there.

On a more shallow level, in my younger years I was convinced the apex of happiness could be reached if only I somehow transformed from an introverted wallflower into a beautiful goddess brimming with witty remarks and personality.

For a time I thought the secret to a happy, great life was a recipe for daily living that I had to follow to the “T” or it wouldn’t turn out right and I’d end up with soggy over-cooked un-edible mess. Or, at least, if I followed the directions perfectly I’d have the most delicious piece of nirvana pie ever made.

But maybe the key to happiness is, simply, to be happy–

just live life, love life and be happy.

Of course I can’t deny my intrinsic nature to seek that “something more.” But I won’t let that desire throb a steady, guilty beat in my heart more than is necessary–because it’s really pretty counter-productive. Just makes me restless and miserable. I do want to change the world, want to do so much–

but maybe the reality is, we are all of us humans without super powers, the limits of our capabilities don’t stretch much further than arm’s length. I can help myself, I can make myself happy first, and then I can help those people in my circle, but really happiness is an individual choice, and you can’t force it at them in any form–

I hope at least most of this makes sense today, because I’m still in the process of ant-herding my thoughts. Those darn buggers are quick.