Starting Over!
Today, I am inspired by the many blogs I've been visiting that invite me into a different conversation than the "daily grind" line of thought and the totally superficial social grease of the wheel that is the weather, sports, and news in general!
Louise LeBrun's blog (www.louiselebrun.blogspot.com)latest offering caught my attention particularly. When she says: "It is not about addiction - it is about having to learn, all over again, what it is to be ourselves!"; I felt that Ah-ha moment. What moved through me was how much words like addictions, mental health, depression, and all means of descriptive code words we use to compartmentalize how we behave are interchangeable and don't mean much in the end - When we put them in the context of our "experiences". The words are not the experience! They cannot describe what's going on, they just reduce it to sizeable chunck we can digest quickly for conversations sake. Don't get me wrong - that's useful too, sometimes!?
What got my juices flowing about her comment was how another "code word" can be experienced through that consideration - man, or maleness, or masculine.
pick one and feel what gows on inside when you allow the words - It is not about maleness, or masculinity - it is about having to learn all over again, what it is to be ourselves!" Wow!
ON my holodeck of the world, in the context of a WEL-systems perspective (see www.wel-systems.com), the largest possible context in which to consider our lives and our selves, that I know of, there is alot of room to consider how to learn to be ourselves, all over again!
What would it be like if we (men) were to allow ourselves to reconsider everything that is possible for us, through a lens that allows for the deepest discovery possible, beyond fears, and egos, and our "culturally conditionned selves"!?
If this sounds like throwing the baby out with the bath water, I can understand...the difference being, through the wel-systems' perspective, that the baby never needed bathing in the first place!!! It is about looking at the water we've been swimming or bathing in all our lives and considering what results that's produced! It is about looking at who put us in that water, and why in their opinion, we needed to be bathed?!
Is it possible that discovering who we are is not a matter of recreating ourselves, but simpy discovering what's been there all=the-while; underneath the thick layers of social norms, rules, roles, laws, attitudes, and especially beliefs about who we're "supposed" to be!???
Think about it...the wider the context for considering who we are and what is possible, the more generalized and unhinged words like addictions, illness, and even "masculinity" become! what do you feel, or what moves through you when you consider and allow for the possibility that the experience of our lives, is more truth-ful than the ideas/stories of our lives, the more our human experience grows, and is less and less describable as either a male, or female experience! I don't know?! Is there more truth and similarity to be found in our human experiences, than in our singular male or female experiences?
creating at the rhythm of my breath,
Ray Landry