Conversations with a Soul (26 page)

Daylight brings its own particular dangers, ones you can see and dodge and wrestle against. You can see where the enemy is hiding, menace arrives in clearly defined, objective ways, but moonlight has the power to reach into the realms we carry within and invite whatever supernatural terrors that might lurk there to come and be present.

As a young boy living in Africa, peering out through a window onto a garden bathed in moonlight, it was not difficult to bring alive the villains and heroes that populated my imagination, nor the things that screamed “danger!”

At first I gazed upon a landscape with which I was intimately familiar. Suddenly I saw it! Lying in the grass there was something coiled and ready to strike. My rational mind struggled to find a reasonable explanation,
wasn’t it merely a length of hosepipe left there from the previous day
? On the other hand it seemed to move, could it perhaps be a dangerous snake? Could it be a deadly black mamba whose bite resulted in certain death or a cobra that could spit venom into your eyes and blind you? In the moonlight it was impossible to tell. I couldn’t remember seeing it there earlier in the afternoon.

And were those bushes merely bushes or did that one in the corner just move? And why were the branches of that tree swaying back and forth? Was it merely a gust of wind or was some other nameless terror perched in the tree watching and waiting for me to fall asleep?

The next morning, bathed in sunlight, the garden had returned to its normal welcoming state with an innocent bit of hosepipe lying on the grass and bordered by bushes that stayed put! An occasional zephyr of wind played with the leaves in the friendly tree that invited me to climb its branches and promised to play along with me by becoming a proud ship or a sturdy castle. Set in daylight my imagination was mine to control, set in moonlight, control was wrested away and my mind became possessed by someone or something else.

I have since found, as an adult with a fairly well developed sense of clear headed reasoning, that moonlight
still
has the ability to create its own reality and terrorize me. Should I be so foolish as to invite and then entertain feelings and ideas that habitually flirt with anxiety, then the absence of daylight and the powerful effect of midnight gloom is all that is needed to succour a sleep-robbing fantasy!

Here reside the daemons with the ability to transform a simple thought or innocent question into a churning maelstrom of doubt which no amount of turning and tossing or clock watching can calm! A physical symptom which I can easily brush aside in the day becomes far more menacing at night. Words spoken or withheld come to accuse me of callousness or cowardice. Doing math, especially trying to balance income and expenditure and find the money to pay for an unanticipated dental procedure, casually bans the gift of rest. Reflections on just how fragile is my grasp on stability and how utterly dependent I am upon circumstances over which I have no control, is guaranteed to send out an invitation to all the ghosts that reign in the realm of my insecurities.

…
nor the moon by night.

Reality has many faces and usually it’s the light that brings the faces alive, and sometimes it’s the half-light, and there we brush up against the
terror of the night….the terror.

After one sleepless night I wrote:

Down through the dark corridors of the night

ride the emissaries of madness.

black hooded cloaks to hide their faces,

lest they be recognized, challenged and banished.

Slithering into the unanswered questions

and laying bare the terrible uncertainties

they play with fear and toy with anxiety.

“
Is it true. . . “ and the ancient question

baits and sets the trap for what is truth at two am?

Logic and reasoning wither and shrink when

questions of adequacy are hurled at an inadequate story.

Slowly the hours tick by and still their power is undiminished

Until, at last, I yield to the faint light heralding a new day.

Then I rise from the struggle to live a new story.

There was a time, in our early years, when we were free, gloriously free, to live each moment without those misshapen twins,
fear and shame
, sucking the joy and spontaneity from life.

Some parts of ourselves felt good, so we touched them; some experiences felt rich and warm, so we sought them out; some functions were pleasurable, so we enjoyed them. A curiosity about ourselves, led us to explore ourselves as best we could. Likewise, we were compelled to investigate what mysteries lay hidden in Dad’s ears, mouth and nose, and through peals and gurgles of laughter, when Mom blew raspberry kisses on a ticklish tummy, we simply lived the joy of being alive and being loved. How completely and utterly powerful was their unconditional approval.

As we took to discovering the world about us, we employed the same curiosity and abandon in our great explorations. Anger, fascination, tenderness, assertiveness, curiosity, tears, laughter plus a great many more emotional realities simply burst forth in a visible, spontaneous response to whatever was happening to us
in that instant
. In those few years we lived with a kind of emotional transparency never to be repeated in the future.

However, little by little, we learned that such uncontrived responses to life could be costly, especially when they resulted in terrifying censorship and a withdrawal of affection, the two things we feared above all else.

The message delivered was that spontaneity was, at best, inadequate, at worst, bad. We needed to learn how to change our unstructured emotional behaviours and our impulsiveness into something that others would find acceptable and reward with acknowledgement. So began a long and often painful process of instruction. A whole army of adults participated in the
socializing and
civilizing process
– behaviour boot camp 101! On the basis of their approval or disapproval we were taught what it meant to be
good
and what it meant to be
bad
.

Good boys don’t play with their penises or pee on the flowers or refuse to share their toys with their sister or ignore Grandpa or Grandma. Good girls help Mummy and always clean up after themselves and never cry without a reason and are always polite and bath every night and are never smelly. Both boys and girls are good when they say and do what others expect, at whatever the cost, and bad when they don’t.

Irrevocably, through our growing years, the world changed, from a huge free-wheeling playground into a controlled and restrictive workshop on how to behave. Our focus switched from doing what brought us pleasure to learning how to please others. Many of the lessons left us feeling guilty:
Look how sad you’ve made mommy feel, go and tell her you are sorry.
Even those glorious moments, when we achieved something that left us feeling proud and invincible, from somewhere a cranky adult would arrive to crush the achievement by suggesting …
don’t let this go to your head!

From surrendering to a glorious moment of spontaneity, to casting a furtive eye about, unsure of where the invisible limits had been staked out. Sometimes our failure to observe the boundaries was announced with what looked like a question, but adults frequently confuse questions and statements, hence;
how many times do I have to tell you not to do that?
Is certainly not a question about frequency!

Unfortunately, there could be no other way!

Parents and those who share in the immensely difficult task of communicating the mores and values from one generation to another find it painful but inevitable that a child’s free spirit be restrained and their energies redirected. Irresponsible, self-absorbed and self-centred children, carry those traits through to adulthood presenting them with a unique set of difficulties later in life. Which is why, in one way or another, we all have a self to work on, even if that 'shadow self' is sometimes more visible to those who love us than it is to ourselves!

At first the lessons are delivered by our parents, and perhaps other members of the immediate family. But soon, the task is taken-up by a far more powerful group – our peer group. Most parents like to think that they are the prime movers in raising their children but all too soon that role passes to a group of contemporaries,
the friends!

Furthermore, children, don’t always need others to restructure their engagement with the world (so that they might earn applause) – they do it to themselves!

Almost from the first day at school and certainly by the time we have reached high school, we’ve practiced how to present ourselves in the way we want others to see us. We lied about our accomplishments so as to look good in the eyes of those we envied and with whom we wanted to be identified. We denied our own values so as not to look weak when they were looking for signs of meanness.

I remember pushing a kid up against a wall and threatening to beat him simply because a group of boys, whose respect I craved, goaded me on, even though the fear I saw in his eyes shot like an arrow deep into my Soul.

For the first, roughly, twenty years of our lives, the
refinement
continues unabated.

We not only create and nurture alternative ways of being, some of which are significantly different from the self we believed ourselves to be, but we learn how to present ourselves to an audience that watches our performances. We become highly skilled in 'reading' their expectations and we soon know which lines bring applause and which scorn, irrespective of what is going on inside us at the time.

Some of us, the lucky ones, manage the transition from childhood to maturity without being scarred by shame. The journey to adulthood is often tumultuous and the pathway littered with adolescent and immature decisions that leave us embarrassed and sometimes angry.

Never the less the transformation is accomplished without the sacrifice of those qualities that make childhood such a special time. Joyfulness, spontaneity, curiosity and creativity are all preserved to be reborn into an adult world.

However for others, (most frequently men, who seem to have great difficulty in making contact with their inner selves and feelings) the journey could only be accomplished through a surrender of their unique self, and the adoption of a persona dictated by a community of contemporaries.

Sometimes we were aware of the roles we played and the disguises we wore. At other times the transformation was so thoroughgoing that what we once celebrated and valued as being essentially our true self became buried under layers of compromise. Of everyone it could be said:

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts.
⁷⁴

And, one might add, each part demands its own script within which it is possible to be lost and absorbed into the life of a character. In one way or another we all struggle to be authentic while the audience demands something else and the audience almost always wins! They have the power and the price of our inclusion into the group is that we conform to what they want us to be!

And it never changes.

The school bully becomes a manager and our performance is all important and tied into any hopes we might have of promotion, even when we hate the job. Consequently some men and women go home at the end of the day secretly grieving, almost as though they were in mourning for something that was dying.

The question, of course, is
what happens to all the parts that are found to be unacceptable and consequently need to be banished?

Do we actually manage to kill off all the “bad” parts of ourselves and eliminate everything which the audience deems unacceptable? Do we ever really manage to tame that which longs for freedom and expression and whose expulsion periodically calls forth a moment of unspeakable rage?

Do the coping skills, which demand that we eschew a self-image that seems weak and vulnerable, or one that is strong and capable, mean that we are doomed to live out the rest of our lives as inauthentic individuals, until we’ve learned the script and we recite the lines with ease and we no longer feel discomfort living a borrowed story?

Or
do those parts of us that were banned from expression continue to live on, locked-up somewhere deep down in our psyche, sometimes present in a scream of anger, sometimes in unutterable grief, sometimes lived out in patterns of self-destructive behaviour, and sometimes present in a wonderful, life-giving moment of abandon?

What do we do with what some have called,
our shadow side
and why the allusion to darkness and shadow, why do we append “darkness adjectives,” words like
dark, shadowy, sinister
when we dare to engage what was buried in our subconscious many years ago?