It’s Not Easy Being Green

A Kermit reference, not a meme

As a very young child I occasionally had the experience of a vortex pulling me down into complete loneliness and isolation. It felt very much to me like water going down a drain. At the very bottom of that oppressive well I would occasionally drop into complete silence, which was a refuge of sorts for me. The problem was that the world always called me out of that place and its doorstep was just as painful on the way out as it was on the way in. But at some distance away, where the gravity was not so strong, there was a space of melancholy that I was very comfortable in. I didn’t mind hanging out there despite the fact that I was still alone. It also served very well with the few friends that I had. Listening to people from that place seemed to comfort them and that way of connecting did mitigate, very briefly, the loneliness of my perceived isolation.

When I was about 7, I started wanting to be 60. That was retirement age then and I didn’t think that I could make it through what was looking to be a very long life. I remember waking up mornings wondering how I was going to make it through another day. The way that I experienced time back then, my days seemed eternal. Moment by moment dragged on, one after another, at what seemed an endless pace. My only respite was to stay as busy as possible, which would bypass the time-sense temporarily. But another issue was that in experiencing time in that moment-by-moment fashion, remembering things over longer intervals was often not easy. I’d read a story at school and felt a visceral sense of what the characters had experienced but most of the details that I was queried about afterwards did not stay with me. I’d keep having to refer back to the text for answers, which did not typically allow me to get the work done in the allotted time. This had me thinking that I may not even be able to adequately function in life even if I could endure the experiential eon that it would take to get to 60.

Another ongoing experience was the sense that I just did not fit in….anywhere.  In high school the discovery of the illuminating properties of drugs finally enfolded me into a small group where I felt included. When my experience of frequencies began some years later, I thought that the experience was wonderful and immensely fascinating so I kept nurturing that tuning, and still do. My friends, in those early days of it, were all into hallucinogens so accepted my sharing as unusual but acceptable. In 1976, well after I had given up the drugs, I did a month-long yoga teacher’s training course at the Sivananda Ashram in the Bahamas. I casually mentioned my experience to one of my classmates, who, it turned out, was having experiences that were similar. She being from Chicago and I from D.C. there was no impulse to keep in touch and as it has unfortunately turned out, she was the last person I’d meet who could relate to these experiences. After that I just kept it to myself and the experience of being a bit alien has never left me. For that reason, fitting in has always been one of the underlying aspects of this personality. In spiritual or similar communities I’ve mostly felt that I would fit in better if I just shared what I was seeing rather that how it was coming to me. Even someone that I know well and knew of my energetic life once said to me “You just think that you fit in. People know that you’re different.”

I was extremely fortunate to have met my wife at the Washington DC Sivananda Yoga Center in 1977. She has no interest whatsoever in my spiritual expeditions, philosophical musings or the many groups with which I have been associated but her very presence does keep me grounded here, as do our children. However, aspects of me still long to find people who can understand what I see and sharing about my “frequency soup” is, first of all, hard to describe, and secondly a bit too weird for most people to relate to. Thus this blog is a coming out of sorts as well as an invitation for others to share. If I was hiding out, who else might be?

These days with “energy work”, “we space” and the like becoming more commonplace I feel a just a little more free to share. And though frequencies are beautiful, fascinating and useful, they also come with turbulence and occasionally the deep disconnection that I still tend to resist. Alan Watts wrote a great little book – he actually wrote many great books – called The Wisdom of Insecurity. Indeed, flowing around in my energetic world presences the clear evidence that my identity, this notion named Justin, has no fixed address. The “insecurity” – the letting go – allows for unencumbered flow but unencumbered flow leads to experiences where personal identity has no stabilizers. I must allow for thoughts and concepts to corral an experience’s natural traits and name them in order to get a toehold in that new environment. I then cognitively pull in more detailed descriptions, along with the energy on which those thoughts ride. Without this process, Justin cannot move this identity into that territory and use it as a transitory platform for exploring the next unknown terrain. Language and sharing stabilize the way-stations that I create but it seems that some angst, trepidation and occasional fear are part of the payment required for transport to the next locale. Isolation and exploration both have costs so if you want to play in the fields of consciousness, be ready to pay up. Like any frequency, there is movement and each has varied pleasures and discomforts, particularly in the crests and troughs of the flow .

Now with all of that said, there is both an observer and a witness that this I contains. The observer does assess, from a seemingly vast array of relatively quiet places. The witness, however, does not assess. No thoughts exist in that place though, in fact, “I” have witnessed Justin’s thoughts from there. With that in mind “I” am very aware that everything stated above is transitory and without significance of any kind. What is also a transitory truth is that the sense of isolation has been a habitual resting place for me as long as I can remember and “I” still do have some affinity for the light melancholy that exists in the energetic neighborhood that surrounds it. Being cognitively aware of this does accelerate the exit from those frequencies but has yet to remove the natural gravity that pulls me back there.

Some time in my 40’s my mother said to me, with a bit of exasperation, “you were as old as the hills the day you were born.” Though many people say “life is short”, that has not been the case for me. Some days it feels like I’ve been here forever and at those times I do feel old and still alone, despite my loved ones around me. In my depths, “I am not at home here” still has gravity. As transitory as I know it must be, I still meander down the well trodden pathway to that place and marinade its gentle flow for a while.