Thought Picnic: Drawing strength over the memories

Bringing strength to bear

Sometimes, I start at my keyboard about to write a blog and I end up writing something different. When writing, I have the impression the intended blog would be woven into what I am writing and then it becomes clear that I need to separate issues, the connection is in my head rather than in what I am writing.

My eyes have been welling for the past hour at the keenness of memories I should long have forgotten but have a recurrence with the vividity of clarity and import, there is much that is in churn that I need the spiritual to address the emotional, the mental, and the physical. The spirit of a man will sustain his infirmity; but a wounded spirit who can bear? Proverbs 18:14 (KJV)

The haunting of the mind

“What was silent in the father speaks in the son; and I often found in the son the unveiled secret of the father.” Nietzsche

This saying that I heard on Criminal Minds brings to the fore the subject of memory, the things from childhood and adolescence that anyone else involved might well have forgotten and I would have been expected not to remember. Not only the father, but also the mother, or maybe more the relationship between parent and child. The past comes in a ghoulish likeness to inflict and torment, you steady yourself with some resolve, even as others might have reached for a stiff drink.

Yet, we live with our memories, even the ones we want to get rid of and forget totally. Along with some comes the smell of the atmosphere that represents the recall, the hurt, the way you felt, there is a hurling up, the burdens we bear of the narratives that become our stories in the saying appearing at the end.

“There is no refuge from memory and remorse in this world. The spirits of our foolish deeds haunt us, with or without repentance.” Gilbert Parker