Brains!

I read back over my blog today not surprised to find that I have grown since I started back then. Gosh am I thankful that I have grown. I will always stand by my realization that college saved my life. Education saved my life. I wonder sometimes where I would be without it, probably at home the same mostly, except that I think I would comprehend things differently and my mind would be quite narrow compared to now. Last night (and often at night) I was scared again. I don’t know of what but I just lay there and I feel like things are pulling away from me, and the sky is ever expanding until space is all there is. I think I’m just frightened about the future only because I do not know what is coming up. I don’t want certain things in my life to end, or to start for that matter. James sleepily listened to me and tried to answer my questions but he either doesn’t think the same way I do, or he had no idea what I'm talking about to begin with. Poor boy, I give him the worst time. All he wants to do is go to sleep and I sit there blabbing on about bluntly honest things. I don’t understand how he can stand to be with me. Last night I told him how I continually want to change him in to what I want him be. A couple of my friends say they have that problem in relationships too. I don’t really want him to change; I just want him to grow. I want him to do everything he possibly can to be the best person he can be. And in my opinion to do that is to read, go to school and have an open mind, and so I think James should do the same. Then I think to myself, well he does do those things on occasion and he has other things that make him grow too. But I realize what I want him to do is think the same way I do. I like to think of myself as ever growing. I mean that I am never fixed in one concrete spot. That my mind is ever growing and adapting to the new things I learn and that challenge my bias and sometimes even convert them. Jeez I say to myself. Aren’t I always the one to say there are more ways to approach life then one can ever know and there is not one right way to do it, so that gives me literally no right to feel the way I do. Sigh…I'm destructive sometimes, and I disappoint myself a lot. But as I said I’m ever growing and maybe one day I’ll get over it.

I am taking Living Myths: The Quest for Self with David Sander. It’s a religious studies 300 level course. It’s my favorite class and so far topping the charts of favorite classes at Humboldt State University. Basically we are exploring myth as a primordial and universally human way of knowing. Myth means story in Greek. Some things my teacher said about the course: “we can think of myth as a forest of unknown size. We are going to take a likely looking path into the forest, but by the time we get to the other side, we will have seen only a fraction of the whole. Even so, we will have gained experience to help us when we reenter the forest in the future, on different paths…myth is a medium between self and other, between time and eternity, and between conscious and unconscious levels of our being…Myths create worlds of perception and meaning, and these worlds have boundaries. In each of these worlds are an everyday place, an underworld and a heaven, and in each is a sacred center. The center is the focus of the quest. Our understanding of this quest comes through symbols, and there are few definitive answers.”