Sap Mgmt.

Just to let you know I’ll be in for the next six months. You see the days need a bit of order. It’s what I will be doing in the vines. Cutting back the old growth. Pruning. It’s all about sap management.

It’s what I’ll be doing too. In Plaissan in a yurt. Cutting back old growth. Learning to stretch into myself. In the vines it’s what makes everything fruitful, the control of the flow of sap. Having realized that we humans are all sap too, I figured it should work for me too. Sap Managment Inc. is what I am calling myself. It’s a total self-service business.

So for the next six months I’ll be in the vines, or my cell in the big house that’s just up the hill from the yurt, cutting back. Making room to breath new breaths. One after the other, like the years in the vines.

Order. Consciousness.

Clip-Clip-Clip.

Another Day

I was back in the vines again today. The pause after the harvest is done. The last full moon before winter is waning, the cutting back begins. I was happy to see the vigneron and his wife, and they seemed happy to see me. We exchanged the stories of our lives from the last chapter which ended several months ago. I could say it was an uneventful day, but then what day that we are alive is un-event-full.

There is a woman, I don’t know, who is going to the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist uses images in situations to get into what the patients are feeling. This doctor uses the images as a relational object, a tool that allows her to ‘work’ with the patients. In this case the patient is the woman that I was talking about, the one I don’t know.

For example, the doctor says to this woman patient - you are standing in front of a sink and the faucet is running.

The patient replies to the doctor – I pull out the plug so that the water can run out, and I clean the sink out with my hands.

The conversation goes on. How do you feel about doing that, what are you thinking when you are doing that, what does that bring up for you etc. etc. Well they get to the crux when the woman, who is the patient I don’t know, starts remembering that at 8 years old when her alcoholic father was slapping her mother around, she had taken a frying pan and whacked the father. The father quickly proceeded to pass out on the ground.

She thought she had killed her father. Imagine what would run through your head at that point. It did for the woman and she consequently pushed aside, into the shadows, those reactions for the rest of her life until that moment with the doctor. When the doctor asked her what that invoked in her now she says two words. .Culpability. Guilt. Then is silent for a long time.

It seemed hard to believe she could forget such an event. At least that’s what I thought until I tried to think about myself at 8. It was long ago but still within my lifetime. It was me - and as I realize when I remember something from a long ago time – it is me. But thinking back to 8 years old I could remember nothing. Zero, neither good or bad. Just nothing.

I know something must have happened, and if you told me something from then I would probably remember it. But randomly I could bring up nothing. I suddenly thought how the woman I don’t know could have forgotten that episode and the soaring – Culpability and Guilt. – that came within that moment. Why would you want to remember it.

That’s who we are, the events we are made of. Remembered and forgotten, they etch themselves into our brains. Like deeply embedded lines of code on a computers hard drive, if the right buttons are pushed they dictate how our program operates.

We’re complex, we have code in our brains that was written tens of thousands of years ago that’s being added to at every moment we experience. With this we make our life. We are all working on our own hard drive which is connected to a network that spans all time. Meanwhile our shadow is constantly hiding, following us, shifting shapes, insinuating itself into who we are.

It’s amazing we aren’t all screaming and wailing in the streets. That is an event itself, and it happened today. That’s why it’s hard for me to say that it was an uneventful day even though it seems all I really did today was just more immigrant labor in the vines.

Perplexed

Hank is way out on the edge. Every moment has become critical, and the moments just keep coming, one after another. Fatigued, broke, with everything on the horizon but nothing in hand. Hank is full of potential, but then again he has been all his life. It finally has dawned on him he has to act, that time is running out.

The realization did nothing however, to change anything. He still was ensconsed in his life, and everything had recently got more complicated. Perhaps that was the cause of his realization. He found it hard to remember which had come first – his crisis, or his need to act. In any case he had little idea what to do.

His first response was to run, flee, escape, but he had no where to go to. It was this fact that had left him, if not frantic, at least perplexed.

There were moments now when he felt pressed against something opaque and yielding. He could never break through it, but now he was so far in, that he saw no way back out. There was no light at the end of this tunnel, just an omnipresent dim glow which was so diffused that it seemed to come from everywhere. He was paralyzed with the thought of suffocating and cognizant of the fact that paralyzed folk can’t move. This was the edge he was on. An edge so far down that it was without a precipice, leaving Hank without his default option of falling to get started.

In his everyday exchanges Hank admitted to be worried. There was no way to explain more. Who could feel see his churning thoughts. How could he describe the weight of his limitless potential. And why describe it, no one cared for either his reason why all potential was limitless, or his explications of why his was un-actualized. Even Hank had tired of them.

No, the time had come to act, to move, to get on the ball. If he could just get started…