A Dark Turn of Mind

As Percy prepares himself for a journey to unknown shores within the context of a surreal, blessed and heart opening adventure in risk-taking, there aren't many narratives jumping up to be limned. The return to the quotidian details of working toward a PhD, an unexpected health issue, a welter of sudden work and simply the relatively dull round of daily life all conspire to temporarily put a kind of cone of silence around story. 

But make no mistake. The trip through Hades continues, no matter how reassuringly routine or layered with transcendent beauty each day is. In particular, the aspects that are reminders of the passage through the Underworld:

Haunting dreams, sudden surges of complete lack of trust, fierce possessiveness and jealousy, fear that feels bottomless, the uncertainty of navigating new terrain (professionally and personally), further, deeper step work around the sex and relationship inventory in step 4, body dysmorphia and food control issues, excoriating self talk, retreat to meditation that yet is an experience of the chatter of a million ghosts, arguing with oracles, feeling stuck in regard to the behavior and choices of others, powerlessness over my own fate, and an enduring, haunting, shadow sense of my own mortality. 

And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
In navigable weather it is always a seamark
To lay a course by; but in the sombre season
Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.
--TS Eliot, excerpt from The Dry Salvages, Four Quartets

The Pacific side of Isla Magdalena, BCS, from a day before I knew better where I almost died from heat exhaustion-- but that's another tale