Seasonal Engagement

I am slowly realizing what happens to me in the summer. I have spoken, for a couple of years now, about how my brain comes back to life in the spring and have joked that sometimes I can feel my neurons firing. It’s an intense feeling.

When I drift into the spiritual realm, which I need to do and sometimes have little control over, the result is that I cannot function on a concrete mundane level. I can’t concentrate, I can barely hold a conversation on something I know something about, I can’t socialize, and the need to do any of those things makes me anxious. Recently, I have been aware that sometimes I cannot function in French. It has been a challenge and I thought that establishing a routine would sort that out but it has not. When I get that anxiety, I cannot produce or understand French very well. I have been calling it a fog because that is what it feels like. Apart from the anxiety I am emotionally... raw, for lack of a better word. In that state I can only be in that state. I am aware of too many things about other people’s stress levels and emotional states, I see the world differently than I normally do, and I interact on an energetic level. I get that every moment is a moment of pure potential and it bothers me to waste time doing things that seem not to matter. I have been feeling for a while that I need more meaningful connections with people and I think this is why. I need a level of intensity that matters.

More and more I find that my previous spiritual experiences are not things that are likely to occur anymore. I started drinking, not a lot but regularly, to keep them under control. That seems to work, but as I cut back I now find a deepening of my day-to-day experience; it is as though I no longer need the extremes - that it is more of a steady gravitational pull. I function on another level almost every day now. I used to have peak experiences that I did not know how to integrate into my life. The aftermath disturbed me greatly as I could not deal with how stark and meaningless my life felt afterward. There was certainly no deluding myself. Now, instead, I find my experience becoming richer in general. I came to terms with the peak experiences but I didn’t exactly welcome them. Now that my life is changing, I need to find a way to welcome them. The only way I know how to do that is to integrate those experiences into my life. The only way I know how to do that is to talk about the world as I experience it....which is hard because most people don’t know that side of me. Actually, nobody knows that side of me. A few people know it exists, but they don’t know that me because I don‘t talk about it. A number of months ago I realized that I have virtually stopped talking to people on a meaningful level. I am not totally sure what happened, but I remember finding it frustrating to share my experience with people; it was extremely rare to find someone receptive, never mind someone who understood. As a result, I think I fragmented. I have learned how to relate on a concrete level, which I could not do before, and I have integrated my emotions into my life, which is good. However the spiritual side of my experience rarely leaves my head, the realm of my personal experience. That side of me is so much a secret that I cannot articulate what I feel or how I experience things. I stopped talking and then forgot to talk, or maybe forgot how. Sometimes there is so much going on that I don’t know where to begin. Maybe I just need to grab threads and see where they go. If I am going to move forward, I need to figure out how to integrate my full experience into my life. Not everyone has to know or understand, but I need to start with a few.

I find this is very stressful.