A Pilgrim’s Progress

Every time you escape the Grail woods in your own life, you learn a little bit more about yourself.

Some ideas are very, very sticky to your mind. Some of those move along the path, and some keep you stuck right where you are. Those are the tar babies.

What could I have been, if only all of this hadn’t happened? That’s my own private tar baby. The only answer? What happens in life is what happens in life. Nothing else happened. What happens now in this moment is all that matters. Every moment in my life lead me to now, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Sometimes the idea that no one else can understand our suffering turns out to be the stickiest baby of them all. 

I did not realize that the name of this Uncle Rema story was also a racial slur until after I put it up and got some comments on TikTok. This is my response!

The Jenga tower of your psyche is the way it is because that’s how it had to be to get you out of your childhood. You may as well learn to love it, cause you are the only you you’ve got!

This is the next obstacle for our pilgrims on the trail to the Western land. The canyons of the Furies! These ancient goddesses will chase you mercilessly with their fetid breath and their hooked beak and their talons. You think they’re chasing you, but really they’re in front of you calling you to their cave.

Sappho was a Greek poet from the island of Lesbos, the original lesbian! She wrote “if you are squeamish, don’t turn over rocks”. She meant that if you turn over rocks, you’re gonna see creepy, crawling bugs under there, and things that you might not want to see. Well, we have stones in our minds, parts of us that we don’t want to see. My experience as a Warzone kid is that if I don’t turn over those rocks and learn to accept whatever I find inside myself without judging it, then I’m just gonna stub my toes on those rocks forever. When I look inside myself without being squeamish, and except whatever I find without judgment, I find that the scary, creepy, crawling bug bugs are just beetles and centipedes doing their natural thing in the world. Like Popeye, I yam what I yam. In my life the act of trying to change myself just keeps me stuck where I am. When I accept myself without judgment, that’s when things change.

Sappho was a Greek poet from the island of Lesbos, the original lesbian! She wrote “if you are squeamish, don’t turn over rocks”. She meant that if you turn over rocks, you’re gonna see creepy, crawling bugs under there, and things that you might not want to see. Well, we have stones in our minds, parts of us that we don’t want to see. My experience as a Warzone kid is that if I don’t turn over those rocks and learn to accept whatever I find inside myself without judging it, then I’m just gonna stub my toes on those rocks forever. When I look inside myself without being squeamish, and except whatever I find without judgment, I find that the scary, creepy, crawling bug bugs are just beetles and centipedes doing their natural thing in the world. Like Popeye, I yam what I yam. In my life the act of trying to change myself just keeps me stuck where I am. When I accept myself without judgment, that’s when things change.