Monday September 3, 2018

Feeling a bit like a child that got lost in the woods. That, for me, is the archetypal event, the shape and substance of my life. Our earliest stories, I tell myself, are the ones that spin our worlds. Today, on my birthday, I feel again like the lost boy. Isolated, distant, unloved, particularly in relation to my parents and my siblings. Perhaps the love I fail to receive, though, is the love I fail to give. A quote from French writer René Daumal hits me like a ton of bricks. “I have brought you this far,” he writes in his book Mount Analogue, “and I have been your leader. Right here I’ll take off the cap of authority, which was a crown of thorns for the person I remember myself to be. Far within me, where the memory of what I am is still unclouded, a little child is waking up and making an old man’s mask weep. A little child looking for mother and father, looking with you for protection and help — protection from his pleasures and his dreams, and help in order to become what he is without imitating anyone.” Perhaps I should read Edwin Bernbaum’s book, Sacred Mountains of the World. Or perhaps I should make a pilgrimage to the Sangre de Cristo mountains (Spanish for “Blood of Christ”), a subrange of the Rockies located in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.