Well, we have made it to the weekend, actually the near end of the weekend with the 8:45pm point of writing this post. Maybe I need to alter my writing of these posts by a day or two prior to the publishing date, but I digress. This is one of the “ReVisiting” I have decided to work on. This time I went way back to 2012 – nearly the beginning of the blog, and pulled up the post “Finding My Way“. This post was a sort of internal phrasing of where I was at the moment. I was burned out on nearly everything I was doing, and I desperately needed a long break. A three-week long trip was planned to drive up to Glacier National Park, with stops in the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Colorado in both the going and returning aspects of the trip. The trip turned out to be exactly what I needed. An internal reset. I certainly could have used such a trip earlier this Summer, but COVID-19 had other plans, which have kept me in Hillsboro, Texas for quite some time. This has also allowed me to step back into the analytical approach as to how my personal Path has been going, where it has been, and where I hope it might go.

In the “Finding My Way” post, at the very end, I left a rather disjointed statement about getting back to my poetry, which I have, as a means of bringing things back together. Now, a little over eight years later (I wrote the original post on June 12th, 2012), I have started to understand far better that the Path is not always a straight line. And sometimes I have no control whatsoever where it will lead me to go. While the analytical part of what I wrote was a good look at where I had gone with my career, which is currently not at all where I ever envisioned it would be, another song besides Rush’s ‘Finding My Way” (the lyrical inspiration of the post) brought a much deeper piece of analytics to me – Queensryche’s “Someone Else” from their “Promised Land” album. There are two versions of the song on the album, and this one is referenced as the “full band” version on the 2003 reissue of the album. As follows are those lyrics:

When I fell from grace I never realized
How deep the flood was around me
A man whose life was toil was like a kettle left to boil
And the water left these scars on me

The chains I wore were mine, dragging me towards my fate
Planned for me long ago
I played by all their rules, went to their right schools
Who was I to question?

They used to say I was nowhere man
Heading down was my destiny
But yesterday I swear that was
Someone Else, not me

Here I stand at the crossroad’s edge
Afraid to reach out for eternity
One step when I look down
I see someone else, not me

I know now who I am, if only for awhile
I recognize the changes
I feel like I did, before the magic wore thin
And the baptism of stains began

Sacrifice, they always say… is a sign of nobility
But where does one draw the line in the face of injury?
I’m just trying to understand

Standing here at the crossroad’s edge
Looking down at what I used to be
A drowning man, trying to stay afloat
Heavy with the past, but somehow keeping hope
That there’s something more that is seen
But it’s somewhere out of reach

So I keep looking back
Looking back and I see someone else

All my life they said I was going down
But I’m still standing stronger proud

And today I know, there’s so much more I can be
I think I finally understand

From where I stand at the crossroad’s edge
There’s a path leading out to sea
And from somewhere deep in my mind
Sirens sing out loud, songs of doubt, as only they know how
But one glance back reminds and I see
Someone Else, not me.

I keep looking back at Someone Else… me?

I realize it is a lengthy quote, but the song has some real meaning to me throughout my life. All the way through sixth grade, I was a student that was ahead of everyone else. I read on a near collegiate level, while most my class lagged far behind me. My teachers had nothing but very elevated praise for me. When my father reached the end of his thirty-two year Air Force career, we rotated back to the United States, Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama to be precise. My parents enrolled me into Catholic parochial elementary school for my sixth grade (a repeat grade for me because I did not have all the credits required to move to high school due to the differences between US schools and DoDDS (Department of Defense Dependents Schools). This was also my first introduction to the concepts of main-stream, popular music. That was predictable measure for my grades to drop. I went from the top of my class to a continual and constant finish at the back of my class through to my high school graduation. As the song notes, no one had a lot of hope for my ability to make anything of myself. And I certainly listened to all of that and played predictable to it, with the exception of my extremely high ACT and SAT scores. But scores never mattered to me, and I kept to my constant routine of being more of a failure than any kind of success.

My long hair also did not endear my very well to my extremely strict and conservative father. The fact that I immediately went back to wearing my hair long past my collar after I left the US military brought a lot of the anger and disappointment of both of my parents aimed directly at me. Much later, my mother confided in me that my father was never more proud than when I was promoted to Sergeant. And never more disappointed than the moment that I was removed from the military with a General Discharge (Under Honorable Conditions). He was disappointed. I was ready to live life under my own terms.

Most likely, I am a typical Libra. I see all sides of an issue. I see the good and bad in people. I always seek balance. Except when I am traveling my own road. I am quite the free traveler in all of that. If a certain pathway looks more intriguing to me, I will take it – if I can. My entire world view has been one of experience – both good, bad, and disastrous. I remember points in my life where I lived in a one-room apartment. My meals were ramen (yummy and salty!) and popcorn. Yes, I bought those large bags of pre-popped popcorn, and I could live off of that for nearly a week. From that point, I have also owned my own home, had more than enough money to pay the bills and then some. I have seen both sides of that hill. I have driven cars that I am absolutely sure were never safe to be on the road. I’ve purchased brand-new cars. My life has always been about experiences. And it likely always will.

I have tried a few different aspects of Paganism. And my Spirituality continues to be about experiences. That is an integral aspect of my Spirituality. I cannot fathom any part of my lifetime without that.

Each of those experience are what I consider to be “crossroads” in my Life. Now, at fifty-four (almost fifty-five), one would think that these crossroads would begin to be less and less. Not so…crossroads will always occur throughout this Life, and continue on into whatever happens beyond the Veil. I would hope that I am less likely to jump in any direction than I was in my youth. I hope that I am far more considerate about what each direction might hold before setting a single footstep in that direction.

At the very end of “Finding My Way” I made the following observation about trying to move forward with the expressed intention of folding more creativity into the daily recipe of me:

In other words – just let the G-ds club me upside the head with Awen — and see what happens.  And through that — explore the “me” a little more.

In essence I was a little naive in my thinking. Creativity is all around me. Not just mine, but everyone else’s too. Someone’s creativity created the laptop and the Windows 10 environment I use. Someone’s creative created the WordPress platform I am typing all of this into. The creativity of the band members of Queensryche provided the music I am listening to. Creativity is everywhere. There are waves of it invisibly washing over us every moment of the day. Just gotta grab one of those waves and let it take you wherever, while opening yourself to what it is and whatever it brings to you. As a simple aside, this is exactly how I do the writing for this blog. I do not typically write the way other folks seem to – find a topic, plan out what to write, and then fit what you type into that. I just let the wave take me wherever it does.

A long time back, everyone in my life told me that I would never really be anything in life. And I listened. Until the military showed me I could do anything I put my mind to doing. When I came out of the military and into the world, I did not try to conform to anyone else’s standards of what I should do. I conformed to be what I wanted me to be. I took my lumps for it. There were some truly dark times associated with my choices. But those were my choices. I owned the consequences of those choices, and in my opinion – I grew up in ways I never thought I could do. My father always told me I would be irresponsible as an adult, simply because I didn’t follow his way of doing things. A few years before his death, we reconciled our differences and he admitted he was impressed with the way I handled my life. It was what I truly needed to hear…even if it came too late to really soften my heart towards his stance. But that’s another post of self examination….

–T /|\