Photo Credit: Michael Fagans / The Californian

For an explanation to the startling phenomena that is Willard’s apparent appeal as a potential chosen one to lead our country into the post-Mayan Calendar future, I turn to the renowned psychologist Arno Gruen. In his book aptly titled: The Insanity of Normality (Grove Press,  Inc., 1992) Gruen describes the Willards of the world brilliantly: “It is an act of self-betrayal when children begin to lose consciousness of their own self. This process begins when they no longer perceive the feelings of their fathers and mothers directly but are guided by the way their parents see themselves. Such “adaptation” to the power needs of parents leads to a split in children’s  psychic structure, separating their interior world from its interactions with the environment. In order to be able to share in the power that subjugates them, children substitute obedience and adaptation for responsibility for their own actions. If we lose the connection to our own interior world, then we can relate only to a false self, to an image-oriented self attuned to behavior and feelings pleasing to our surrounding world.”

Thus the existence of what I see as an epidemic of individuals, the Willards of the world, utterly disconnected from their own autonomous selves, unable to contribute their own absolutely unique selves to the betterment of the world as a whole. Instead, these Willards perpetuate an ever broadening population among us of what can only be described as ‘zombies’, ie: human bodies housing utterly unformed souls, frantically seeking the approval of those around them for having conformed perfectly. If one looks into Willard Romney’s eyes as he attempts to describe himself in such a way as to be accepted, one can see the very essence of ‘frantic’.

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images North America

Gruen continues: “I believe I have found many indications that destructive and murderous behavior is rooted in the betrayal human beings commit against themselves in order to share in a hallucinated sense of power.”  Further, he states: “This insanity can easily conceal itself in a world in which deception and trickery are approved methods of adapting reality. Whereas people who can no longer bear the absence of human values in the real world are considered “crazy,” those who have severed themselves from their human roots [Zombies] are certified “normal.”  And it is members of the latter group to whom we entrust power and whom we allow to determine our lives and our future.”

While his fellow Zombies may see in Willard an electable kindred spirit, those of us fortunate enough to be connected to our interior lives must remain vigilant in these times and not lose our grasp on our own rudders. We must, no matter the price, vehemently reject the ‘Willards’ among us as our potential leaders and instead seek out individuals who have done the very personal and courageous work of creating an autonomous ‘self’ that we can then evaluate for leadership potential based on their inherent, and dare I say divine, truths.

© 2012 Nancy Kotting   All Right Reserved   Reproduction by Permission Only   Contact: NancyKotting@Gmail.com

N.K.

______

C-

I can’t recall the moment when love burst into dust and fell like ashes at my feet. I can’t recall. What I do recall is the hallow heart, sunk somewhere behind my ribs, lost. The years, the chemicals running through my brain, running so hard, so fast, to the destination of nowhere. Again. A touch of skin, a momentary retreat together he and I, along the fence lines in my mind. Then the days, the weeks, the months of grave digging. Burying the dead with our rotted shovels and pointless cursing. Time comes to stop the gaze. Stop the plot line running between my thighs and let the air freeze. To be still. To surrender to something other than him, his scent, his noble and innocent attempts to come home. A dash, a glimpse that might have been, for a moment, familiar. A flash of something, or perhaps someone, across his face that launches the film reel that is my heart. Just one more time.

No.

Let the air freeze, let it be the sharp nothing that sails down into my lungs. It is so effortless to muse of love on and on and on like a school girl, a virgin from nowhere, speaking of all the nothing she knows. To muse of none, of the dead, is different. Only after all the crucifixion, the disappeared and the haunting do I finally have something to say. To think of Christ coming into such a place, such a dark and ugly place, this place, with a love not seen.

This is a waiting.

Exiled.

He has called me here and I pretend to understand. These fallow fields, the little old churches at every hamlet, curtained farm-house windows, dogs chained, coats raised to the Ohio winter, my old truck hugging the crown of the back roads. I walk into Adoration. The arch above the chapel tells me I am in the ‘Holiest Place on the New Continent’. This is where he has brought me and I never knew. These years of being here, and not knowing.  I was here when we first spoke. He brought me here, then he brought you.

When I sit in the pews and gaze past the wilted shoulders of the old ones with their Rosaries softly falling and their tattered prayer books, when I gaze upon the image of Her, the babe in her arms, I sit and wonder if the love of a Mother is the only love there is?  What other conclusion am I to come to?  She never had to try to love a man. She loved God, that was all she had to do. Of that a son born, and a love for us to know in the white space of our lives.

Tell me this is so.

-Helen

___________________

© 2012 Nancy Kotting   All Rights Reserved   Reproduction with permission only   Contact Email: NancyKotting@gmail.com

On Christmas Eve morning of 2009 I stood before a Catholic Priest in a small town in rural South Korea. At my side was a man about to become my Godfather, a man with whom I had walked to Mass that morning, braced against the incoming Siberian winds. That man, Caleb Botton, had abruptly and somewhat mysteriously come into my life months prior, arriving seemingly with one purpose: to guide me as my treasured friend and teacher through the closing months of my Conversion. That morning, following the daily Mass, I was baptized.

Christmas Eve was spent with Fr. Maximillien Marie and the Community of St. John on a steep hillside above the neon glow of Busan. It was there that I received consecrated Holy Communion in the soft candlelight, surrounded by loving strangers. I can still feel the warmth of that night as if it were before me now: the soft faces of those witnessing, the calm serenity of Fr. Max and Caleb’s knowing smile.

Two years later as the anniversary of my baptism approaches, I am reflecting back on a seemingly ridiculous warning Caleb made one afternoon shortly afterwards. I remember his words almost verbatim. They seemed so ominous and at the same time totally absurd in the context of my life at that moment.

In his deep baritone voice he proclaimed that I should prepare myself and hold on, that God would now take away everything that does not serve him through me. He warned that I should be prepared to loose my family (my immediate family consisted of two siblings and my father’s widow, all steadfastly atheist) as I now have a new family. Continuing, he said that I would more than likely loose all of my wealth, all of the material constructs with which I had defined my old life, a life that no longer existed. He said that I had died to that old life and with my baptism, was born into a new one and that I now belonged to God and to the Blessed Lady, and it is to their will that I must submit. In the face of my confused protest he sternly professed: “It doesn’t exist anymore Nancy, its all gone.” He was adamant that I shed the trappings of my ‘old’ life as quickly as possible by my own device or risk having them torn from me in ways that perhaps would be not so pleasant. ”The closer you come to God Nancy, the more fiercely the enemy will attack.” I took him as being a bit dramatic to say the least, but the steady urgency in his voice gave me pause. There was clearly something he feared, something he feared on my behalf.

So heavy these words weighed upon me, yet, at the time they were simply that: words. I flippantly regarded them as such and nothing more. My conversion was strong and undeniable, this I remain in awe of. Nothing could have stopped it. My entire life prepared me for it, led me relentlessly toward it. In my ignorance I presumed my baptism was the crescendo, the accolade, the culminating triumph of a lifetime of meeting each challenge. I could rest now and find solace in my prayer life.

What I failed to comprehend, what my Godfather attempted to make clear to me, was that it was in fact just the opposite: my baptism marked the very beginning of my life. This made zero sense to me at the time. Intellectually, I convinced myself that my 4+ decades of making my way in the world prior to my Conversion amounted to a life fairly well lived, a life of accomplishment, hard earned. I was proud of it, all things considered. I had overcome many obstacles and educated myself. I had travelled and achieved professional as well as artistic success. Yet, this man, my Godfather, now referred to me as a baby. Informing me that I knew nothing of what was to come. Over the two years since, my Godfather’s words have returned again and again to haunt me, at times comfort me, and in the end: prepare me.

It is now December, 2011. Over the course of the past two years since my Baptism, Confirmation, first Confession and first Holy Communion, each and every caution given me by my Godfather has indeed come true. It has been a relentless, merciless and breathtakingly thorough stripping away of virtually every single facet of my old life. Some by choice, others by circumstance and still others by malicious and seemingly baseless attacks. My beautiful home is gone. I am peacefully estranged from the toxic and atheistic constructs of my family. My material wealth is gone. My livelihood that sustained me at the time is gone. Virtually all that I thought I held dear, as the cornerstones that defined my life, my identity, my place in the world have been stripped. I will not deny it: this relentless culling has often left me physically riveted in fear, broaching terror, paralyzed in my own mind and cast deep into an internal silence I often thought I simply could not bear in the throes of many, many a dark night.

I understood little of what was happening to me nor why, nothing made sense. It did not make sense to me for one reason: I continued to evaluate and process my life through the lens of my old self, a self that no longer existed. I had not let go of it, in spite of my conversion and baptism. And yet, I endured, as it was ripped from me, piece by piece over the months that followed. In the valleys of these times, racked by confusion, I reached for my Rosary and held tight, held tight to the very Rosary given to me by my Godfather after all of the previous ones I had purchased either broke or disappeared. Of heavy cord and wood, bearing the St. Benedict Crucifix, it holds strong and rests now draped across my heart as I write.

It seems this period of shedding the remnants has come to an end, for now anyway. What remains?  I contemplate this question daily as I work to discern the direction of my life. If God has removed from my life that which does not serve him through me, then what remains therefore MUST be nothing other than his will for me.

As I look at my life now what I see astounds me: Many who played significant roles in my previous life are gone, peacefully so in a natural departure. The people and things that existed under false premise in my previous life are gone. Liars, parasites, and those seeking to reflect well of themselves in the shadows of my past wealth have been removed. Material constructs that buoyed a life that was not my own but the expectations of others, are all gone. More profoundly perhaps, the very desires that drove my behavior, the petty needs, the external affirmations, remain no longer.

In grace, a very select few individuals have emerged within this new life with renewed understanding, and the warmth of knowing. The selflessness and humanity of these people whom God has selected to remain in my life, after all the culling, have demonstrated to me the divine nature of true humility.

Each day is filled with a purity of intention, a focus that is direct, yet not attached to false desires. There is a peace that anchors the core of my being. Do I fret? Yes. Do I experience anxiety about the unknown going forward: of course. But, where there was no anchor prior, where there were only temporary, external ports of safety to which I would cling, there is now an internal base upon which my soul rests. A glorious repose. Emerging from these years, I am at peace. I know not what tomorrow will bring yet I will meet it with the one thing I now know to be true: that the strength of my Faith will guide me steadfastly through whatever may come.

What I previously viewed as cliche, I now know as a governing Truth: Those God casts into darkness, he casts out of his eternal love for them, never to be abandoned by that love. It is there that you will find him, and truly know him. Enter in peace; enter in joy for we are truly the blessed among us.

©2011, 2012 Nancy Kotting   All Right Reserved    Reproduction by Permission Only   Email: NancyKotting@gmail.com  

Opening a tattered moving box labeled with various markers no less than four times, each move crossed out by the next, I pull out three smaller boxes, one wood, one papered cardboard and one an old shoe box.  Inside are the thrown together remains of the sewing boxes of no more than four generations of women.  Thimbles, fabric weights with images of Niagara Falls embedded in them, buttons and bobbins, snaps and various spare parts for women’s undergarments no longer in fashion.  Several pin pricks into the thread search, dead set on finding the perfect shade of hunter green, I pull a spool out, trying unsuccessfully to ascertain the color.  The label answers my question: ‘Invisible Thread’.

September 11, 2011

I read a quote yesterday that went something like this: “Death comes to each of us not once but three times: once when the body ceases to function; the second time when we are laid to rest and the third time when our name is spoken for the last time.”  And what links these three?  The invisible thread stretching through the minds of those whose lives ours touched.  The invisible thread stringing the memories and the grief into a comprehensible order of what remains: the thoughts, the pulse of the thoughts, the flickers of light in those thoughts that once again evoke a smile as our hearts seem to turn within our chests to glance back just one more time, one more hopeful time…to a trail now empty.

The thread often becomes visible in a scent or the flection in a voice, the slope of shoulder in a crowd or the cut of a jaw line that causes our heart to leap, only to be caught on the exhale back into emptiness. It is found in another’s story, words not our own yet painted across the canvas we long ago took a knife to in our rage of pain. It is found on the maps of our minds, our feeble attempts to drive a dart deep into the compass point, freezing time somewhere, anywhere but here.

Comes a time when the grieving come to envy the dead, come to envy their peace. The very nature of peace changes and becomes known in ways never fathomed. The thread holds tight as anger seeks ballast. The thread bears witness as the living ponder the cost of the one way ticket to home. The thing about invisible thread is that it never breaks, and cares not the direction from which it gets pulled taught. It exists to hold, forever.

Years pass. Our gaze fades into the dull hues of now. We long to touch but fingertips meet nowhere. Our dreams taunt and toy: the dip, the dodge, the faint. And we awake missing the night.

We reach into our own blindness and know the thread is there, sighing in comfort’s crumbs. Crumbs guarded with our every hope and dream, altered, edited, erased and re-written again and again and again till we sicken at our own thoughts, spitting at the promise dawn made.

Standing, we greet gravity like an old friend, settle into the weight. The needle still, the thread comes through, to be pulled and knotted. Holding the fabric of our lives, we pierce and pull through, pierce and pull through, ragged seams joined, held tight, with invisible thread.

© 2011, 2012 Nancy Kotting     All Rights Reserved     Reproduction by Permission Only   

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