Look At Yourself.

"Look at yourself, boy," says that song I'm listening to.  It is a women singing, actually.  I wonder what she means.

"Look at the sunrise, look at the moonlight.... I know what's best now," she says.

Sometimes when I listen to songs I imagine that these people are talking to me.

And when this woman talks to me I have a hard time with what she is telling me to do.

I never thought it would be so hard to look at myself.  Not because I look away in disgust, but because I find myself looking at so many things that I don't know which thing is authentic.

I have so many ideas, so many things I feel, that it can be hard to know what is real.

I once told someone that I was afraid of all the secrets that I kept from myself.  They didn't understand.  They felt that honesty was something that was easy and only a matter of intention.  In some ways, they are right.  But in other ways it is much harder than that.

I have many ways of keeping difficult feelings at bay.  I had many walls that I had put up.  Some of them narrative.  Some of them needed no words.  I simply didn't look at certain things.  Didn't feel certain things.

It is difficult to know where to look when attempting to look at oneself honestly.

But I'm starting to feel it all much more clearly.

I'm reckoning more than ever with the limitation of thought.

What I'm really discovering is the power of feeling.

So strange for me, a person who has always been incredibly emotional, to realize that I have fought my feelings so much; that I had chosen to ignore their logic in favor of a cleaner, clearer, more superficial intelligence.

I'm beginning to understand the intelligence of my feelings.