Baruch's Blog

I'm grateful that I live out in the country because I do not have the patience or the filters to deal with people much. I can't seem to get past this hair trigger rage that has been with me since August 2004. It's a problem, and the only respite, the only recourse, seems to be no people except those I trust and know well.

I was doing pretty well, and then EAT happened here and the stress of trying to make this thing happen perfectly, which it did not in part due to my mistakes and also to things beyond anyone's control, along with some of the stuff I experienced with some of the people attending the class, has put me on edge and I am still feeling it. The course was great as usual, but some of the interpersonal stuff really challenged me. My ability to be patient or resilient in the face of what I experience as rudeness, self absorption, and a host of other annoying behaviors, is vastly diminished.

I do my best to stand for a lot of things in the world; kindness and compassion and love and nature and all that good stuff. As a somewhat public person, to whatever extent I am, I think some people expect me to behave in the ways they expect a public person to behave, i.e. an acquaintance recently was very offended by the comments I made about the abrahamics in my previous post. I have had a friend take me to task once when I shared some of my personal feelings about my first visit to Germany and some of my personal familial cultural baggage about that country.

I don't always make it pretty. I know that. I do my best to keep it real.

In the spirit of keeping it real I want to share here, again, how changed I feel since my mother was murdered 6 years ago. It's not that I think a lot about the event itself, or her, or her death. It's that I mark that event as a pivot point in my life. Something in me changed. I feel like an instrument that just can't stay in tune, and the discordant note is more often than not one of rage, also grief. Nameless rage and grief because, when you come right down to it, they are feelings that aren't hooked onto anything specific. In moments they are, but there is this just this endless well of ambient rage and grief that I draw from, or that pushes itself through me.

Yes there are plenty of things to be angry about in this world. I mean...look around. Listen to people. Rome is burning and there are billions of Neros fiddling away. It's beyond weird. Similarly there is plenty about which to feel grieved. We all know it. I can't readily escape it these days.

I am posting this because I know there are people who read this blog who love me, who I love, and this is one way to communicate with them. Also because I imagine there are plenty of others who can identify with some part of what I'm sharing, and that seems somehow useful.