Ways of Knowing #1

Of all the classrooms, in all the universities in the country, I had to walk into this one. And it was right! Sure...it's going to be some pretty fluffy learnin', but I've got a BA in English. I remember fluffy learnin'.

In which you read something and sit around a table and talk about it for several hours. I found myself writing down things JN was saying just because, not even because they were necessarily going to be pertinent. This, I feel, must be a good sign.

The difficulty I already know I'm going to have with this course--a course about "Great Stories", archetypes and "restorying" the world--will be keeping a healthy distance from it. So far, the things we have been assigned to read have felt like things I would choose to self-therapy my way through my current personal situation as well as all the build up from the past. (Using the phrase 'build up' makes me feel like my life is hair that has been overly styled.)

There were times, the other night, as I listened to my classmates speak in wise and complex sentences, that I felt just as I had in my philosophy of religion course as a first year in college: in over my head with nothing to add but overly personal details.

This is going to be good for me. Whoa what? Yes. This will, in fact, be good for me.

I have, in the past, approached education from the back of a draft horse. I am lookin' down on the world, 'cause I'm such a big fat smarty pants. Education was what I did. I looked for knowledge as a way to set myself apart from (and often above) the unbathed masses. (Holy hubris Batman!) This time around, the feeling is different. I am entering into a something very purposefully. I am driven by a goal that feels like something beyond myself. This, of course, also sounds New Age-tastic, but it's the only way I can phrase it right now.

I am beginning to understand the concept of Call. I still thumb my nose at the church-hiring process, (the concept of "receiving a call" as though from god, and not from a bunch of men and women sitting around a table in a church basement), but as I begin my religion-studying, I find the word popping into my brain more often with less sneering.

It is because I would like, someday, to be able to sit down with someone and lead them through their own personal version of Inanna's story--or Christ's--leading someone out of their own underworld. 'cause if I can get off my own damn meat hook/cross/tree of life/what-have-you, I can only hope to give someone else the spiritual/archetypal tools to do the same.

But this set of thoughts is exactly why keeping a healthy distance from the material is going to be difficult. It will be hard to discuss the archetypical importance of Odysseus' journey when I'm thinking very obviously of my own seven years lost on Calypso's island.

It will take focus, but focus has been distinctly lacking as of late. I look forward to it.