“Pathologizing psyche is not wrong…and to realize deeply that it is not wrong, but rather necessary, is healing”  James Hillman

IN DAYS SPENT

I found myself cascading off mountains,
plummeting down towards anger,
uplifting my eyes to guilt,
surrendering to helpless stagnation.
Looking into the eyes of maniacal loss.
A sweeping denial;
dulled vision.
Possible continuation swaying in the breeze.
Doors of life and death are seen as if a mirage.
Attainable wisdom – in shadows of regret.

Rain swept eyes,
with sand-filled lids.
The swaying breeze,
adrift at night.
Connecting shade to light,
on maternal touches.

Silent stillness falls upon our next dream,
and we run towards life,
like a leaf to the sidewalk.
Railings close in our tears
and imprison our thoughts.

My heart cries for the illusions;
the eventual confinement of ideas;
The deadening cascade of tides – slicing anger.
Melting degrees of silence.

Tonight we wait,
tomorrow is a cloud covered sky,
hiding the blue sweep of eternity…
and here I cannot weep.

September 23rd, 1997
Spending our time consumed by so many confusing emotions have taken a toll on me. My feelings drift from anger to sadness and rest, finally, on confusion. How am I suppose to feel? What am I supposed to do? With everything that has gone on this month, it’s no wonder I haven’t had a breakdown. It’s finally subsiding a bit. I guess I’ve given the facts — if Paul won’t accept his illness, then neither I nor anyone else can do it for him. We all feel so helpless. It’s hard to sit by watching someone create illusions, hide behind fear and know that the only way out for them, if he stays this course, is death. Knowing that it doesn’t have to be this way is very disheartening.

I remember trying to rationalize with Paul, to find a way for him to see his mental illness in a new way. It became rather more of an education in the way our society views mental illness, and I began to see these parallels between shamanism and mental illness. Due to their constant connections to the spirit world, Shaman’s were often considered outsiders. I also began to see how prevalent bipolar affective disorder was in our society, and how so many of our great musicians, writers and creative types of all kinds suffered from it. I don’t know if any of that helped Paul, but it started me on a different path that is only now coming clear.

Pathologizing is defined by Hillman as “the psyche’s autonomous ability to create illness, morbidity, disorder, abnormality, and suffering in any aspect of its behaviour and to experience and imagine life through this deformed and afflicted perspective {…} without the archetypal fantasy of pathology there would be no shaman.” James Hillman, Daniel C. Noel

I wish
I could stand
on both feet
looking at the sky.

I
wish
I was
a lone eagle
with wings to fly.

I wish
I could feel
more then
a feather drifting
by.

“healing begins when we move out of the audience and onto the stage of the psyche, become characters in a fiction {…} and as the drama intensifies, the catharsis occurs; we are purged from all ailments to literal destinies, find freedom in playing parts, partial, dismembered, Dionysian, never being whole but participating in the whole that is a play, remembered by it as actor of it.”
[ p.176 Daniel C. Noel quoting Hillman from ‘Soul of Shamanism’]

– Continued in Part Three
— Related Post — Old Journals ~ an introduction