How To Love Even It Is Very Difficult

The search for a path through life

Photo: Fungus and lichen, Tallman State park

A continuation of Notes from Dec 4.

I suppose that in the end the question is how we manage to keep turning everything into a story about ourselves. It's clear from everything around us from the moment we are born, that we are part of something much greater than any individual person, and yet the psyche forms itself from the beginning around a cold, hard core of dead material that insists it owns everything. We call it the personality, we call it the ego. Call it anything you want; it is blind to the greater good from the beginning. It wants for itself.

This strange and lonely world, which we spend most of our lives, either enslaved by or struggling to overcome, is exactly the kind of place Emmanuel Swedenborg describes hell as being. So perhaps we are born into hell and trying to climb out of it into heaven throughout the entire course of our lives. I know that sometimes it feels that way.

Some readers will know that I keep a picture of myself with my sister on my desk at all times. It was taken in Scheveningen, Holland, in May 1963. At that time I was seven years old and she was three. When I look back on this relationship, some 12 years after my sister died suddenly at the age of 51, I remember over and over again how I from the time when we were young children always saw all of the relationship as being about me.

I was never quite clear, until the last few years of my life, that may be the relationship was about her.