How do i re-connect with my own mythology?

interviewing a lot of lookouts about their work, i discovered everyone dominated by a personal mythology, or a way of seeing things. one lookout always had a mirror out, looking at everything from two sides. another had a log fall on his father, right after his father had told him how not to have that happen. once he sat in his tower, and a tree fell close by, loggers at work without his knowledge. i had the feeling he was always waiting for the log to fall (maybe on him). 

the way i discovered this was recording the interviews and then listening to them for clues. certain words, certain images would come up over and over again. there's really nothing mysterious about this. yesterday, i read a lot of ancient greek and roman poets. any creative person reveals themselves, in fact they have to for their work to resonate. all of us somewhere reflect on the agonies of love, the inevitability of age and death. the ancients sound very like me!

and that's the consolation of the arts. they tell stories of what we've all gone through. i myself am a part of human history and not alone. i may be somewhat unique in experiencing LIFE AS THERAPY! this morning i listed all my therapeutic activities: 

                                  1. theater

                                  2. travel

                                   3. art

                                   4. writing

                                   5 . photography

                                   6. love affairs

   the list could go on and include actual therapists (3) and psychics (5), all of whom kept me going, even if they couldn't cure my anxieties. one said i'd been too impressed by death when young. i'm not sure if this came from newsreels of world war two or my preacher father's celebrations of funerals. i do remember running out of the room to escape the women in black and the friend underneath glass in his coffin, this the day after i'd been playing with him.

as for my own mythology, when i first started writing a lot at 17, i imagined myself as a clown falling through the universe. i think that my dominate image, though i also thought, interviewing myself, I WAS ALWAYS HIDING IN THE CENTER. i suppose that's like being invisible even as i exposed myself in photos and poems. this could be the reason i've never pursued a public career. one psychic, after reviewing my past lives, said, "You carried so much responsibility in past lives, including being a scientist who helped blow up Atlantis, you get to play in this lifetime."

yes, i do think this time as cavorting in a playground! unfortunately, even as i've enjoyed process more that product, i wish i had something to show for it, a legacy i could leave. maybe throwing out fifty boxes of notebooks and journals not such a good idea. still, as a friend said some years ago during our new year's day consultation, "nobody will want to deal with it all." i realized she was right. only the publically accomplished have their papers installed in institutions.

i haven't really answered my original question: how do i re-connect with my own mythology? theoretically, any of my old methods should work. i don't know what's stopping me from taking the first step. i suspect it's looking for results, rather than merely enjoying the process. there's always a chance drawing the first line could end up being a rembrandt! does it really matter. acclaim doesn't wake the dead, alas. on the other hand, merely taking a walk with observant eyes always brings something new. 

Where have all my heroes gone?

 actually, they haven't disappeared, i simply forget to consult them. for example, FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA. as i sat in the san francisco poetry room of city lights books, looking at all the tomes on the shelves, pulling out this one and that one, searching for inspiration from poets past and present, only when i pulled down lorca's collected poems did i feel the rush of delight from the past. it is very odd, in a way, since he was obsessed with death from the beginning, and it's always present. early on he treats it in a child-like way, the landscape, the moon, stars, wind, the girl in the apple tree, always surviving the death of the rider passing by. there is a certain permanence in the song.

let's see, another hero might be CG Jung, the analyst and magician of the collective unconscious. one summer on stateline lookout at lake tahoe, i read 44 books by and about him. i'm not sure how he consoled me. mostly his concept of the Anima, the image of the perfect woman in each man, seemed to apply to myself. he describes her as very demanding, never satisfied with any human woman you may choose, also competitive with her and extremely critical. my own moods seem dominated by such an inner witch. not surprising, since my mother harsh with all my girlfriends. she, too, couldn't stand any competition. 

jung's concept of the archetypes explained a lot to me, especially the trends of history, how one would dominate a certain time i lived in. ah, i've forgotten how he did it all! the vision would certainly apply to the time we know and hate. Could it be the archetype of the Lie? what i admired most, i supposed was the life he created, how he kept himself sane, working with his hands and having a brilliant mistress. he knew how to stabilize himself and actually created a psychological mythology and method which could be of use to many people, especially artists. and he could pursue a thought down to the depths of a rabbit hole. also with mandalas, he created a way to use art as a stabilizing force.

what other heroes came and went? i'm trying to think of my early days in sports. i was never very good at any of them, though i played tennis, baseball, football, basketball, and bowling. not being a team player, i could never pass the ball and served out my days on the third string bench. i do remember admiring willy mays and i quote him often: "i go with my strengths and forget about my weaknesses." that still seems to me very good advice. alas, i have spent way too much time being lost in efforts to be rational and calm. even years of therapy never brought that about. 

the only politician on my list JOHN F KENNEDY, a bit tarnished by time, all his messing about with prostitutes secretly brought into the white house by the back door, his suspicious shadow over the death of marilyn monroe, his getting us involved in vietnam. a hero may only remain one by my knowing too little more than too much. they're really actors on the stage, magnified by their simplicity. the character strutting the boards before me not human beings but mythologies. that's what heroes do, they create myths of themselves. and i absorb the energy they give off in the process.

alas, all heroes prove to be human-all-too-human. as real people they die. that's a fact i can never quite get beyond. true, their stories live on, i can participate in them vicariously, and be inspired by certain events, certain works. i have become too cynical, too worldly, and yet when i remember to go back to the source, THE HEROES JOURNEY,  and do what i can to remember my own, i'm revitalized. it's a lesson i have to learn over and over again. 

How do you recover your balance?

i have to admit i feel off-balance 75% of the time. for example, i arrived at the lookout after four days off. it was dark. the wind blew hard. unwisely, i carried my first load up the road and lookout steps, overburdened. i'd driven most of the day, a total of seven hours. no wonder i lurched badly sideways ascending the steps. as usual, i forged ahead without thinking what i was doing. i reached the landing, thank god, then had trouble inserting the key in the lock. once i did, the siren went off. 

the relief lookout had set the alarm. boy, it damn near broke my ear drums. hastily, i rushed to the basement and punched the buttons. thankfully, the sound stopped. by now i was at least alert. this is just one example of rushing through the world and almost losing it. at times i seem to forget how to walk. making it conscious, i have trouble putting one foot in front of another. it's mostly mental. when my confidence returns and my self-consciousness subsides, i move through the world like nothing ever happened.

of course, physical equilibrium is the least of my problems. all summer i've thought about suicide, i'm even reading a book about it SUICIDAL, WHY PEOPLE KILL THEMSELVES  by Jesse  Bering. this isn't really something new. at 17 i remember being afraid to sleep in a room with knives, afraid i'd do myself harm. maybe i'm always trying escape, as the author surmises. escape from what, you may ask? sometimes it seems hard to do anything i need to do, like pick a pencil up from off the floor. there's a resistance to any action. 

so far, i've been able to pick up that pencil. and i wonder why on earth it seems so difficult? other times i clean the dishes, wash the clothes, and proceed without any hesitation. i do think it has something to do with mental balance, that which comes and goes. often if i can perform the right action, i'm standing back on my own two feet. living alone in a room, everything stable around me, i dive off the deep end into a desire for non-existence. and this doesn't seem to happen, when i'm in motion, when i travel.

for example, last week i reached the end of my tether, worrying about the end of the season and leaving the lookout in a couple weeks. i'd planned a trip east and no one, even friends and family, wanted a visitor who might bring covid. my support system dropped right out from under me. okay, i decided to make a test run. i drove to san francisco and stayed in a youth hostel. they put one person into a room and i had four beds to myself. that was great luck. i had a chance to practice traveling in relative safety. 

for the next two days i visited museums: the De Young, SFMOMA, and the Asian Museum. i soaked up the art as i always do, a vision of perfect worlds. artists create places we can go when life becomes too much for us, this time when nothing seems ever finished - fires and viruses - a chaos without true order. security doesn't really exist except as a result of the imagination. 

to finish off the trip i walked up grant street through chinatown. certainly eerie, 90% of the stores and restaurants closed, and browsed in my old haunt of 60 years ago, CITY LIGHTS BOOKS. it brought back a certain peace. it had changed very little. i sat in a rocking chair upstairs in the poetry room and surveyed the shelves. true, i felt my own poetry could never compete with all this, yet i kept looking for a new poet, stumbling across the old ones. finally, only my own standby, FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA, brought me the solace in needed.

yes, i did stumble blindly on the steps, in the dark and high wind, and two days later the euphoria of travel has worn off a bit. this morning i woke up anxious, wondering if i'd caught the virus. i took a tylenol to calm down. still when i think about it, i enjoyed setting myself  up in the hostel room. even the homeless on the corners  with all their oddities give a kind of consolation. and sitting in the cafe at the de Young, bathing in the sunlight and observing the folks eating and chatting without masks, brings back a sense of normality, and enjoyable existence. i hope i've broken the spell, regained my balance, and am ready to travel again. 

Getting started: process or results?

 my biggest problem: i can never take my own advice. i know what to do. then i'm too lazy to actually do it! they say, "a journey of a thousand miles starts with one step." how true! yet that initial move inhibited by my fear of getting on the wrong path, of committing myself to an endeavor i will most certainly find dangerous or pointless, having wasted half a lifetime to reach an unsatisfying goal. (Carl Jung said, "we shouldn't underestimate the power of laziness.) 

how do i overcome my lethargy? i really have a bad memory for what works. i do know i have been inspired by copying, like an artist drawing old statues or famous paintings and making them her own. i have a friend who copies chinese ink paintings, the results beautiful. he doesn't really know what they are. Are they his own or merely false interpretations? ah, but what is important, every evening he retreats to his desk and becomes an ancient sage. 

if he were too concerned with results, he probably wouldn't do anything, yet the process is its own reward. a choreographer told me i liked process more than results, whereas she focused on the latter. of course, that's one reason i've never become famous. i have completed a lot of projects (fifty books of photos, letters, poems, plays, novels, on amazon). once done, i do find them satisfying. i enjoy, especially, reading my own poems. often they make me laugh. what could be better than that? 

unfortunately, i filled a five by ten foot storage space with at least fifty boxes of journals, notebooks, photographs, manuscripts, and asorted creations - and then i turned eighty. my god, what would i do with all this stuff! in the end, i've thrown out practically all of it, saving two boxes and sending them to my niece for family history. sure, i hope to be discovered. still, i feel now i'm a light-weight. not that i regret writing and filming so much. i have the bulk of results on external hard-drives. my choice of discards: what merely reflected process.

by that i mean diaries, sketches for plays, journals, etc., everything i felt reflected 'mere' preparation. this might have been of interest to a scholar, but every dying artist who hasn't made a name for himself needs an advocate, someone to preserve and promote the heritage. i have one friend doing this for her deceased artist-husband. it's taken her several years of concentrated work to catalogue the mountain of creations: drawings, watercolors, journals, writings. she's created a website. now comes finding an institution to house the rest.

recently, at a session devoted to how to keep your work alive once you are dead, an artist said, "recently four artists in town have died - and all their work is gone.'  this, of course, is a good reason to devote myself to creation for its own sake. gardening is the most popular hobby in the country and the best physical exercise! for good reason: you can eat the results. alas, avid gardeners usually produce too much, eager to give it away, if they can find takers. 

yes, ultimately, for most part, i have enjoyed the process. getting up at five in the morning for days on end, or struck by a certain call from the personal genie anytime whaling away on a collection of poems with a theme (i hardly ever wrote a solitary poem). the  book FLOW by  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi    tells the secret. once i get going, there's no stopping me: not worries about fame or results, nothing related to my image in the world. i expected to be a famous playwright someday and didn't have the right personality. to hell with it!

when i get depressed, i know i'm too inhibited and lazy to take the first step. just doing something will usually change my mood. these days, having thrown out so much, it's difficult to make a move. if i could just draw one line, it would lead to a work of art. if i could put down a few words, it would lead to a poem. i know the right answer to the question: how do i get started? its really easy if i take delight in the dictionary, as i did in the old days. i need to put on a french chanson and soon i'm sent spinning off from france in the fifties into my own heaven.

for Linda