have you ever noticed the cyclical nature of life? the way things tend to wrap around, and wrap around and teach you the same lessons in escalating degrees of intensity if you don't manage to learn them right the first time? these last few years (especailly the last two) i have really seen alot of that. the same lessons from different angles, peeling back the layers of protection and exposing the things that need work. the areas you need help in. while i'm here, i am nose to nose with the areas where i am weak. with the things that i will change, and with those little lessons. like this one "let go" or another "how to rely on and live with yourself" or still more "intercourse is not the same as sexual awareness" to quote DH lawrence, "sex is really only touch, the closest of touch. And it's touch we're afraid of. we're only half concious, half alive. we've got to come alive and aware [...] the touch of bodily awareness between human beings." an ideal that i have subscribed to for some time...but this is in truth a different rant for a different time.

there is a similar phenomena in school that again, in another subtle layer, is mirroring the larger life web i was just speaking of. where all the different areas and subjects that i have studied are starting to intertwine, similar to watching wisteria over a long period of time. it creeps slowly, lazily wraps a tendril around a railing, and the next thing you know there are solid, interlocking branches as thick as your forearm. amazing. i am taking literature classes in modernism, and history classes on the second world war that are currently closely mirroring and helping me to understand, not only one another in the context of post industrial disillusionment and loss, but the world i am starting to see around me as i become a litle more aware of my surroundings. and it seems to me that the hope offered in these novels, history texts, poems, are the same then as it is now. that return to "blood conciousness," the natural world, a realization of the body as holy, as the foundation for a new kind of life. and the healthy and natural sexual interaction of men and women as the great primal healing force for a barren world. see Children of Man if you can, it explores this in depth. DH Lawrence and TS Eliot were two writers who were deeply worried about the state of the world after seeing everything around them shattered by war. today, we have grown numb to that horror. after the wound was cut open over and over again, the nerves have been severed, and we no longer see the pain of humanity, we distance ourselves, we hide, we disbelieve. we want so badly to believe in the good things in the world that we are ignoring the bad. this is why education is mandatory, if a flawed system: for the hope that one day, far enough along, the pieces will connect and children (i include myself in this category, for as close to that adult time as i am, in many ways i remain ignorant, a child) can begin to see.

for this reason, i continue reading, and digging, and trying to understand. Education and nature are the foundations for our salvation. to be truely concious, to be truely in touch is a painful, frightening, and trancendent thing.