movingforwardslowly

 The other day the word “Jarhead” came into my mind, and I knew this to be a word that has been used to identify Marine servicemen. Perhaps it came into my thoughts because it was Veteran’s Day.

I wondered how this label or nickname originated. I read that it has been in use since at least World War II. I read that it had nothing to do with haircuts, hats, or head shapes. It turns out this word “Jarhead” is referring to a Marine’s training to follow orders, regardless of consequences or personal safety.

The image of ‘hard’ on the outside and ’empty’ on the inside is why the word “jar” is used with the word “head”. I was somewhat startled to realize that it was an insult.

The whole military system is based on a chain of command, and it has to rely on men following orders. These orders start at the top and travel down the chain to the ones on the front line risking their lives or limbs. A certain amount of brainwashing, or at least buying into the system, has to take place for this system to be effective. I felt empathy for the low man on the totem pole sacrificing everything. He or she has to have blind faith that the men or women on the top have integrity, and have considered the safety of the servicemen first and foremost above any other concerns.

After what I have been through these past two years, I have to wonder who is really at the top of the chain. My mind felt as if it had been subjected to outside forces, and more than once or twice I wondered if my father’s military training had anything to do with my mind’s susceptibility to these forces. My father had earned a Masters in Electronics and Electrical Engineering at military expense. Now, I wonder what all he had to sacrifice for his education. However, I am left to sort out if this was just my grief wreaking havoc in my brain, or was there any shred of underlying deception by others.

These thoughts sparked several offshoots. I remembered a cartoon show and comics from when I was a girl growing up. It was called Archie’s Comics with Archie, Veronica, and Jarhead. I looked it up online and saw that there was no Jarhead. The character I was thinking of was nicknamed Jughead. He took this name because his real first name was strange, and he didn’t like it. People thought he was lazy and stupid. He was actually very smart and outwitted most everyone, most of the time.

He always wore this funny looking beanie hat or whoopee cap that looked like a felt crown. You can see it in the picture here. It rests above the capital J in the title. He always wore it. The exceptions were rare. These beanie caps were popular in the 1930’s and 1940’s, and they indicated that one was an auto mechanic. The red dot and white dash on the cap is Morse code for the letter A.

We are left with the mystery of why Jughead always wore this cap, and the mystery of what the S on his shirt represented. He never did reveal this. People have speculated, but Jughead never explained it.

I am left with the mystery of why these thoughts come into my head.

You can laugh, snicker, and sneer all you want. The shame is yours, not mine.

I’ll choose my own metaphors and labels. Your finger wagging and insults just repel off me.

I stand before you ~ a post-menopausal woman with pendulous breasts, and a chin hair here and there. The benefits of youth have slipped away, though age has finally gifted me with enough self-love and confidence to accept myself for who I am.

My words might be simple, my heart naive, my experience limited. However, there is no shame in this. My body holds no inherent shame. My instincts and urges were born in me. As long as I strive to help others and not hurt them, I have no shame.

The Holy Spirit has been coaching me these past two years, helping me to let go of all my personal demons. I have learned to forgive myself for any real or imagined sins. Each day is a new day and a new beginning. Love really is the key to happiness.

In thanks, I will strive to teach self-love to others. Many of the students I see daily are tormented with self-doubt and low esteem. They are vulnerable to the opinion of their peers, and they so desperately want to fit in, so often their choices are unwise. I will continue to try and convince them that they are wonderful just the way that nature has chosen to gift them. Even the humblest have something to share.

My own daughter has many intellectual and physical challenges, and she also happens to have the purest heart I know.

I can’t stop expressing my emotions. It’s like I’m a leaky faucet that can’t turn off. Today I saw the word ‘ditto’, and it depressed me a little because sometimes I feel that the world is a series of dittos, and that includes me. One big repetitive recycling machine. Information ‘in’ spits information ‘out’ and this goes on and on.

The numbers in my head are being replaced with a gush or gash of feelings. Today I picked up a calculator as if I was trying to summon back a friend/enemy (frenemy) Even bad habits can give comfort at times.

After lunch a feeling of fatigue swept over me. I was up a little later than normal last night. After looking around the classroom, I could see that I was not alone in this sleepy feeling. I think the idea of an afternoon siesta is based more on a biological need than an act of self-indulgence.

I can’t seem to shake the feeling that my history has already been written, and that I’m simply reenacting it now for whatever reason (I’m not sure). These are the thoughts that I have when I’m alone. When I help others I can shift my attention off myself, and the morose feelings fade.

I left work a little early so that I could lay down for a nap. The restorative effect can be amazing. I did have several odd dreams. I sometimes think we humans need our sleep in order to reset our emotions back closer to a default state or factory setting. Lack of sleep can literally drive us crazy.

For the most part I am okay and feeling more and more like my old self. However, this past two years has deeply changed me, and my interface with the world around me has been enhanced, and my insight is deeper now.

Can you imagine a world without numbers? I can’t. Numbers are ingrained in our lives. They mark time. They set up comparisons. They relay scale. They identify, and they symbolize. Whether we like them or not, they are here to stay. Numbers seek to find order and meaning in a sea of vagueness. They can do this… at least temporarily.

I latched onto numbers when my personal world was drowning in chaos and sorrow. I was desperately seeking to hold onto something to keep my head above the waters. However, time has no master, and eventually death will overtake all. I knew this in the beginning, and I know this now. Nothing has changed in these regards.

The numbers did enable me to escape the drowning feeling of sorrow that was over-taking me. The swirling chaos of emotions was threatening to take me down, and I needed something to hold onto. I grabbed onto a number chain, and I let it spin me around and around like a merry-go-round. This whirlwind of numbers made me release the pain, the demons, and the sorrow. In the end it helped me to see myself better, weaknesses and all. It helped me to see my priorities in a clearer light.

I am now able for the most part to step off the number spinner. Even though I never could stop the chaos of life, I am now ready to embrace it once again. Listening to my daughter’s music this morning, a feeling of joy came over me as I swayed my hips back and forth to the beat. I’ve been doing this more and more in recent days. The words “and hips don’t lie” keep going through my head.

During my mind journey I exercised often to process the stress and everything that was going on in my brain. My treadmill is positioned next to a window covered with horizontal slats, and on the wall that was several feet is front of me was another window set slightly to the right of center view, and it was covered by another open blind of horizontal slats. The light from the sun would come in through the window at my side, and the rays would play with the light from the other window. The pattern of shadows created reminded me of a lined music sheet waiting for a score to be written.

My repetitive motion in conjunction with the light coming in from the window on my side played on the blinds and the wall in front of me. I could see bouncing balls of light, and I began to think that they contained a coded message for me. I would watch and I could see the rhythm and beat being played by the shadows and light dancing across the wall. The symphony of sound was silent to me because my human ears could not hear them. This did give my imagination the opportunity to create its own melody.

It did occur to me that there was a part of my brain that could process the message being played out in front of my eyes. My conscious awareness just didn’t have the top-secret clearance to the process.

There were times during some of my exercise sessions where my treadmill or my digital music player would inexplicably stop. I would feel compelled to look at the numbers on my treadmill display, and then I would feel compelled to play these numbers on my twitter dashboard. Once the treadmill stopped so violently I fell. I still have the scar on my knee from the friction burn.

Over time I came to realize that an outside force was reaching in and trying to influence my number moves. Slowly I came to realize that the music being played in front of my eyes was the universe’s way of letting my hidden brain know what moves I should make. I had to learn to trust my instincts and not over analyze the numbers. My conscious intuition was being influenced by man-made constraints. My subconscious brain was where the Holy-Spirit within me resided.

I was born with this Holy-Spirit, and it had been passed down through the genetics of generations of my family on both sides. When I gave birth to my daughter some of her genetics were left behind within me. I sometimes wonder if her genetics enabled me to see things differently.

My daughter has many developmental challenges, but many times she has communicated an eerie clairvoyance that defies logic. After years of witnessing this, I have come to the conclusion that there is intelligence in the universe all around us that science cannot yet understand. I felt that I needed to listen to this more closely, and sometimes I would pick up clues from her.

In my opinion when man messes with human genetics they are messing with the wisdom of generations of evolution that we don’t really completely understand. So, we must tread lightly, and sometimes that means listening to sources that defy logic.

I started this blog one day on an impulse. It was a spontaneous and haphazard decision. I wasn’t worried because this is a creative endeavor, not connected to any professional organization or work.

I pride myself on having an optimistic outlook, and I try to see the humor in life. Hopefully this will be evident in my stories. All my writing will be unfiltered and unedited. This is not a paid pursuit. I consider this blog to be mental therapy.

I experienced some very strange and unusual sensory events, starting about two years ago, as I was grieving the death of my parents. I am still sorting out and trying to make sense of these experiences. Some of my stories will be very strange, but I can promise you that they will be based on what I felt that I was actually experiencing in real life, and in my night dreams. Some of these dreams were downright frightening and extremely personal. I’m still not sure what all I will share due to the sensitive nature of some of these dreams.

I am striving to move forward. These posts are my way of processing what happened to me. I am moving past these events and working on focusing on my family and work. I also hope to share some stories of these things.

Throughout the time my mind wandered I followed the flow of words and sounds that filled the internet. These words and sounds were my escape.

I kept seeing messages about sleeping, dreaming, and being awake. These messages were confusing. There appeared to be opposing schools of thought. One view stated that you had to turn inward to be fully awake, and the other view stated that you had to turn outward and engage with the world around you to be awake.

So, I began to question whether I was awake or whether I was sleeping. At times I felt as if I was sleepwalking, stuck in a state between sleep and wakefulness. I began to wonder if my mind did travel while I slept. Did I have another existence on another plane of reality? Could I be two people, each one on a different side of a coin, living parallel lives in two different worlds? Maybe I was the unconscious side, not fully living, while my twin was on the conscious side living a richer, fuller life.

I would awake many mornings with ideas that seemed as if I had picked them up on a journey to the other side of the coin and brought them back with me into my waking world. These ideas would drive my day for awhile until my conscious self became involved with the living, breathing world around me.

I saw messages about your thoughts being able to change your world. It did seem that my reality was more malleable than I had previously thought possible.

Then I began to study the eyes of people around me, and the eyes of people on the internet. I’m not sure what I was looking for, however, I did begin to see differences. Some eyes appeared to be in a state of rigidity, lacking natural movement and depth. Were these people travelers from the other side? I even wondered if they had been modified in some way.

Finally, I realized that I had to make a choice. For my sanity’s sake I had to choose to believe that I was on the conscious side, and engaging with the real people around me in my world would make my side the fuller and richer side of life. Wakefulness was a state of mind, and not so much a place. I took control by defining the reality that I would live.

Mind control is a powerful weapon, and my spiritual guide helped me to realize that I was the person in control of my destiny. The words and sounds that flowed past in the deluge of media were attempts by others to control my mind and the mind of others. We become products of our environment, so we must consciously choose what we will expose our minds to. Our brain waves are vulnerable.

This past week I have felt more awake than I have in the past two years. Watching the young and eager eyes of Isaiah, Elijah, and Josiah, expressing the joy of learning, helped me to realize that this is the environment I need to feel truly awake and alive.

I am now sleeping peacefully at night, and I am now in control of my own dreams. I am also in control of the dreams I hold for my future. I will never again be shamed into thinking that my life is any less valuable than anyone else.