While walking the two miles downtown to Lennie’s at 6 PM, heading for the launch of the Brownstone Institute’s Midwest Supper Club, I felt invigorated, both by the walk (as usual) and by the prospect of maybe perhaps possibly meeting “my tribe”! It did feel like this was in the offing. But of course, my skeptical ego tried to intervene: “you’ve been disappointed before, so many times in your life when placing one toe gingerly into various social options that left you, in the end, puzzled, pissed, bored, and/or, their polite cover, “watchfully silent.”
Okay, I reassured ego which, as usual, while pretending to be judgmental, was actually scared: “I’ll either love it or hate it. Either way, okay. Just another experiment!”
Today, as I write, memories float in:
The remark that my teacher (a nun), indignant, made to me way back in grade school: “Who do you think you are!”
My mother, worried, more than once: “Watch your mouth, Ann!”
Instinctively, I am a rebel, a “contrarian,” in today’s terms.
Only much later did I discover I am a “double Sagittarian,” Sun (inner nature) Ascendant (self-expression) and Mars (ignition), all in that fiery mutable sign! So no wonder!
But of course, as a kid in the 1940s and ’50s I was successfully socialized, early on, i.e., rendered either mute or masked, and usually both: pretending. R.D. Laing’s 1967 book, The Politics of Experience, which I read the summer after I told my cheating, narcissistic husband to leave, electrified me; or, as we termed it then, “turned me on.” And of course, from then on for a few years I was smoking marijuana, aiming to do so until my real self could emerge and stay there, beyond the nice smart girl left-brain self-image I had been taught to project. Releasing my eruptive fiery self as revealed by marijuana, I was grateful that it allowed me to drop the cage my socialized ego had erected around my uninhibited, spontaneous nature. Thanks to marijuana, Laing, plus Jung’s Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, my dreams, journaling, and my teacher in graduate school who, though he didn’t understand what was going on, instinctively trusted that I would pull through, be okay — I relatively suddenly discovered, recovered, what I was capable of, and that was to release vision and intuition via the oceanic mysterious right side of the brain, and its links with the heart, which, though its opening took time, did gradually bloom, into beauty and gratitude.
In other words, in psychiatric terms, I suffered a “breakdown.” But I knew that instead, I had experienced a massive “breakthrough,” which, once it began, refused to stop. Nor did I try in any way to stop it, or to “manage” it. I did not see a psychiatrist, nor did I take any medications. This unprecedented, long-running, slow-boiling eruption held a promise: that if I kept going, if I did not get stuck, then I would learn to trust the mysterious infinite universe which moves, unceasingly, while remaining ever the same.
And of course, the even more gradual integration of the left and right halves of the brain, so that left brain external sensation plus logic functioned to serve the mysterious purposes of the right brain, was a matter of seasoning, over many decades, and so now, at 82, I’m just about “mature” in the way even my higher self, my soul, would approve.
So, last night walking down to the “event,” the one referring to which I had impetuously titled, in yesterday’s post — “DATE WITH DESTINY?” — my ego tried to stop the flow: “how pompous, Ann!” — i.e., ego was trying to think better of it, without succeeding — thoughts of all kinds swirling through my often frantic head as usual, but more: I felt drawn to this “Supper Club” event, as moth to a flame. Something good would come of it, I knew it!
And boy did it! Instantly, as I walked in, a few minutes early, swirling energies enveloped me, as I found myself drawn into excited conversation with soul after soul, all of us unleashed, speaking our minds, without reserve; no polite, watchful waiting; just us, each of us as individuals, in sudden communion with one another. The usual social rules of etiquette didn’t apply. Interruptions were constant and fun, volleying back and forth.
So yes, it was a date with destiny. Felt like a new beginning, for me, socially. After so much inner reserve in the midst of the dear young people I live and work with in Green Acres Permaculture Village, I could let loose, without reservation, just like everyone else there was doing! Intensity welcomed. All of us having fun.
Heaven, on Earth!
I got the distinct impression — though of course I didn’t get a chance to speak with everybody, that most of the 42 people who had showed up for this “launch” were associated with Indiana University, at the teaching level, professors, adjuncts. And that they too, given the agenda that has taken over education, also felt released by the evening’s swirling cultural and conversational attunement.
As for the after dinner talk, it was by Dr. Stephen Shipp, the person hired by the board in 2016 as Founding Headmaster for the nearby Seven Oaks Classical School (where they still teach grammar, diagramming sentences, can you believe?), to discuss the book, Democracy in America, by his favorite philosopher, Alexis DeToqueville (his portrait hangs above Shipp’s desk). DeToqueville elucidates four different types of freedom, and cautions that each of them is capable of morphing into its opposite. I appreciate that subtle bi-polar synchronization, rather than the usual polarization that people tend to pick up on and identify with unconsciously, where something is deemed, and defended forever, as either one or the other: context by damned! history be damned!
The historical context most relevant to Shipp: the decision to not obey draconian federal and state “mandates” for masks, social distancing, remote learning, and vaccines —way back during the covid con. Seven Oaks (which began with 125 students, at that point had over 400 students, and now has 576 students) was the only public school in the area to refuse (and get away with it, thanks to an ongoing lawsuit).
I’ve decided to order the book.
After such a hugely successful launch (the Hartford Supper Club started out with only 12 people), we’re ON. Next Supper Club, February 10. If I do this once a month, my social needs will be totally satisfied. YES. Thank you Brownstone Institute, author Jeffrey Tucker, locals who made this event possible, and we intrepid ones who chose to show up.
