Long is the Way, and Hard...

We all have our challenges.  Today Sonia's question asked to describe our previous transformation, which caused my mental processes to look back at the totallity of growth I've been blessed with.

As a man with whom I once shared a kindred spirit informed me, "You can't see how far you've climbed until you stop and look back down the ladder."

Bio of Spiritual Growth:  (Warning:  Some discomforting disclosures...)

I was raised in farming community of 900 like-minded individuals by a close-knit, conservative family who handed me a wonderful Evangelical Lutheran upbringing.  We were poor enough to know want, hard-working enough to know tenacity, and Spiritual enough to know satisfaction.  It was a picturesque childhood I am blessed to have enjoyed, amidst a large and healthy family who participated in every aspect of my life.

At the age of twelve, I was threatened with social embarassment into taking part in what I had been raised to believe was the most vile act a boy could do.  Denying the curiosity of my Shadow planted seeds of self-disgust and soul-scathing which would ebb-and-flow in intensity for ten years.  I tried redemption through lifestyle for three years which carried with it personal pride as well as public and private humiliation via bullys.  I jumped to the other end three years later and attempted redemption through rebellion, embracing the bad-boy-behaviors in a quest for confidence.  After six years of this, I reignited my passion of Spirit and began an assent, but Long is the way, and hard...

Just as I felt the climb had gained enough momentum to become perpetual, I was activated to deploy to Iraq.  I held none of the cultural illusions about why Capital-crats in Washington wanted my participation as a camoflagued cog, and rather than let the anger at a faceless entity or Fate tear me up inside, I assumed the role of sacrifical lamb.

Experiencing the Mesopotamian lands and culture for one year "boots on ground" was the most monumental developmental period of my life, thus far.  I completed the deployment in a degree of Military Professionalism/Mechanism that would have made me, once a twelve year old who watched too much Red Dawn and cried to Lee Greenwood, proud.  My job was dangerous and stressful beyond comprehension; I faced it as Arjuna was instructed by Krishna.

As one of three liberal-minded individuals in the entire theatre of operations, I spent my sparce free time writing or reading many of the books on my virtual shelf.  I began the muscular/focal discipline for a nightly twenty-breath meditation which has been instrumental for my well being.  I worked out daily and trained my body to crave fruits, vegitables, and lean meats.

I also let my home life grow into a family of friends, everyone living together and pulling me into the midst of their hopes, needs, and fights.  I left for Iraq as a boy just beginning to figure himself out, and returned a completely different Man living with a fiance (first time sharing a bedroom) and feeling estranged from every friend.  I was a rigid perfectionist who would only "waste time" in a bar, but would not sit in on conversations about matters I deemed insiginificant, caused by a combination of disgust for the epidemic apathy I found in America as well as survivor's guilt:  No moment of this Gift we call life is to be wasted.

Emotion was something I saw as ineffective and inefficient.  Six weeks after my return, my inability to connect with anyone sparked in me, at most, a slight curiosity. 
A friend I had known for ten years visited me on Halloween night.  He climbed behind this emotional bunker in the span of a six hour conversation about politics, music, Spirituallity...subjects with which my passion had died through my tour and return.  Rather than seeing the healthy answers this presented for dealing with my Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, I saw the Shadow of my act as a twelve-year-old.

You see, my friend had come out of the closet when he was twenty-three, informing me that where we were raised, one grew up without a concept of what it was to be gay.  Here I was, twenty-three and in the most positive point in my life...more capable of connecting with men over a beer than I could sharing a bedroom with a woman I had given a ring.

Participating in War destroys the identity you preserve through memory and crave coming home to, for it evolves apart from you in the roles of your abandoned civilian life.  Halloween night 2005, I took action to search out any latent joy I was too afraid to accept.  I found none, and once again branded the act as vile and disgusting, hiding it from my partner and each of my friends, my military career and homophobic family...even and especially from myself.  Just over a year later, my fiance and I took time to enjoy dance lessons I had bought us a year later.  We laughed at my rigid, military posture.  She told me, "It's good to see you let yourself be uncomfortable.  It doesn't happen often."  I caught a glimpse of the emotional bunker in which I was hiding, apart from real interaction with a world I felt destined to burn myself out trying to fix.  We went out to eat, and I admitted to the Lie between us.  She slid back my ring, then asked me to confess in front of my friends.

In the span of a day, I found myself twenty-five years old without a friend, home, future plan, or even a reputation.  I once again threw myself into self-destructive revel and gained absolute fearlessness at the expense of personal pride in who I was.  I also set to work remodeling a dilapidated house with two men I had deployed with and reading literature like Paradise Lost, writing Hunter S. Thompson-esque attempts of capturing the Loki-principle of nature's chaos giving rise to order.

Six months after the decimating split, I met my Angel...an Arabic student from the City of David who posessed the personal relationship with God I had before this whole story began.  Enter the corny Happily-Ever-After music:

This relatioship began outside of my power.  I did what I could to show this woman that I was not for her.  I was certain I could not be entrusted with innocence.  An Arabic student whose grandparents were Palestinians meeting an American soldier with war experience in the Middle East?  A conservative Christian woman with pride in her morals willing to spend time getting to know a performer in Shadow-satiating theatre with a past rife with self-destructive behaviors?

I did not trust that she was placed in my life until the night we shared one year ago today.  I took her to the same Bistro in which my past relationship had been destroyed.  Here's a few for the Jung fans:   The host seated my Angel and I at the same table at which reel-change took place; I sat in the same exact chair, she in the place of my first fiance.  As soon as we'd ordered, my Angel began grilling me with questions of fidelity...my heart pounded, and I turned to look away.  A music video played behind the bar in which I had felt a Spiritual sense of, "I'll take care of you..." at some point that Spring. 

After dinner, we drove out to the lake at which I had proposed the first time, because it offered a great view of the sunset.  I played 10,000 Days, a song about a paralized woman of Faith who is granted her wings in Heaven...a spiritual metaphor that makes my eyes leak just thinking about it.  As soon as we sat, I began to tell my Angel about the song, and found myself emotionally transparent, without effort, for the first time since I recieved my orders to Active Duty.  We drove to the lake:  entry gate 1, which lead to the site of my past engagement, was chained up.  Entry Gate 2, which snaked up to a place across the lake from, and higher than the first, was open. 
This is where the dialogue took place which begins the next blog entry.