Wild Card Inside. (You Really Should Read This.)

There's this Feist song going through my head as I sit down to entertain the thoughts behind what will become this blogpost.

I feel it all, I feel it all is how it starts and what I want to write about is the potential recklessness of being as god-damned emotional as I am.  I''ve begun journaling again and am trying to take much time as I can to resettle and recharge, too, an intuitive move that I've been drawn towards since November and which, I understand now that I've finally begun, is motivated by my deeper wisdom.  What I call God (proof of either my pure faith or my true atheism: my GOD is the Vegetable Body, the other 92% or so of my body/mind/consciousness that keeps me going while I twiddle along and shit all over my mind with the piddly 8 or so percent of brain power I actually have or think I have competency over...)  Anyhow.  My deeper wisdom, ol VB settled in harmony around me in the kitchen this morning.  I need to journal right now in order to temper and reign in my emotional life.  I've tons of experience in the handiness of this.

It's how I've come to learn HOW to make good decisions.

Look, this is the Old World Western-Wound.  I dont care who you are or where you live, if you've got six kids a monster SUV and a hub who wears a tie to work, a hippy bliss-head wearing few clothes with most your possesions in your backpack and a happy home built by hand in the woods or a high-powered heel-wearing bus-jumping city glam girl with two dates one at happy hour and one at eleven tonight when drinks are half-priced, the point is we all come from the same tribal thing and that is the unconscious presumption that our emotions are somehow BAD or at best SILLY THINGS.

I was in my mid-twenties when I learned the importance of how to name what I was feeling, when I actually was taught by someone that there was a range of inner-life deliveries other than good/bad or even happy/sad.  And I'm coming on the end of my 34th year now, having just put behind me what I would say was my very first year of successfully living according to my own integrated rhythms.  To illustrate:

New Years Day Katie and I were sitting slap-happy as hell and laaaaid-out in a nest on my folks couch watching movies.  Classic sweatpants on Sunday style day.  My boss called to talk over some issues at work.  When I hung up I bitched for a few secs about one certain issue, in order to blow off steam and then resume movie-watching chill-mindedly.  It happened that at that exact moment my dad walked  in and proceeds to bark (my nice way of saying yell, as I've come to accept this is how he communicates: All reaction) Kel!  What have I taugyht you!  It's not personal!  It's work!  It's not personal or emotional it's just work!

Katie and I, as my brother and I so naturally do still, just looked at each other and than busted out laughing so hard and grimy that all we could do was immediately start making fun of dad and each other.  Do you get it?  Here's my father, emotionally screaming about me needing to learn to not be emotional when it comes to work.

And here is the tribal wound:  THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS NOT BEING EMOTIONAL

Emotional lives are real as the chemical epicenters that trigger them.  Indeed, when it comes down to it chemical response is really all they are.  Doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman you've got chemical response centers.  But not having emotional lives, and men in particularly and the devaluing of them and their emotional lives, and the resultant suppressing of women and ours because of that, is the lie that Western Society has so suppressingly cultivated over the years.  It is responsible for all matters of power struggles.  I have zero, that is ZERO friends with whom I've not commiserated over our mom's subtle victim/martyring ways and the demasculation of men at home that ultimately rotates out of all of that.  And it is what it is, built on years of conditioned self-sacrifice.

And behavior is modeled when it comes to how we influence one another.

So therein, the deceptive nature of being true to ourselves.  Emotions suppressed, much like in Feist's video when she tries to bang out the fire sparks, will jackknife out in the most caddy-wampus directions.  The truth is lies in this case, as it is when we react or make decisions based on a charged feeling in the moment.  So learning to not react to them willynilly but also to honor them, feel and integrate them and the messages they inherently deliver MEN and WOMEN, proves to be our generation's most endeavoring order.  I read Committed by Liz Gilbert in the fall, and weeks later a blog post by an old friend in which both mentioned the pure luck of birth that so many of us landed in middle-class lifestyles in the West.  Meaning our problems, no matter what, are motherfuckin high-bottom.  And I will be the first to say that is true, that my people are no longer dominated by establishing compulsion: struggling to put food on the table or keep a roof over head.  My ancestors by and large progressed that for us/me--and with wisdom and more resources comes responsibility.  Period.  Poetry is political, you're life is how you be. And we're all in this together, afterall.

Suppression is suppression and personal power, and oppressing it through de-, and/or over-valuing our emotions by only ever reacting to them, is a behavior that we can either model, or undo.  The results are never-ending.

Word.


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