...not about to see your light...

....till you're bleeding...

I missed Mardi Gras this year, because I had/have bronchitis and a viral infection. It is hard to express how deep my disappointment is -- I've been going to Mardi Gras my whole life. I've missed, now, only two seasons. I go every year - it's as much a family tradition as it is an individual pilgrimage. Yes, it is a pilgrimage, in its own way holy: I go to celebrate the City; to celebrate human nature before the holy season of Lent; to celebrate the senses, the sensual; to thrive, for a short while, without too much guilt and too much mindfulness; to live, for a short while, the life I've dreamed and idealized for most of my conscious life. It's not about excess for me - it's about living the fantasy, about reveling in a construct founded half in reality and half in the imagination.

But Mardi Gras is also a guaranteed trip Home during the year, and I missed my fix. Miss my fix. I need New Orleans like I need food, air, water, love, music, and understanding: these are the building blocks of my survival and continued existence. Without something like regular trips to New Orleans, I go through withdrawal, depression, deep and abiding longing.

I'm realistic enough to know that life doesn't always run the way we'd like. But surely, at this point in my life, I have enough resources and wherewithal to accomplish trips Home, to sustain my own soul, since no one else is going to help me accomplish trips Home. I have to make them happen, have to enable them.

....which raises the question: if I have the power, why don't I make it happen more often? I think the answer is simple: self-protection. If I went more often, I'd function less. The hunger, the restlessness would be fed more regularly, but it would be like oxygen to a flame: it would sharpen, enhance, gorge the hunger. The more I fed it, the greater the flame, the greater the restlessness, the hunger.

I'm keenly aware of my self, my desires. I'm not sure how that keen awareness serves me, other than being able to understand my own motivations and clearly examine my actions with something resembling objectivity. It also allows me to more easily justify and rationalize my actions and non-actions (e.g., reasonable reasons for not going to New Orleans more often) in such a way that is productive and self-protective.

...but it makes me angry sometimes that I am able to restrain myself so well. That discipline - that great and terrible discipline - serves me so well as it thwarts me. Perhaps that it is another function of self-awareness: thwarting lower impulses and self-destructive behavior; in a few words, the survival instinct enhanced to deal with my intellectualism and soul-hungers.

But it means that so rarely do I let my guard down, so rarely do I let myself enjoy things, so rarely do I thrive in the normal, every day, day-to-day environs. And I have to thrive - mine is a nature meant to create, meant to love, meant to seek understanding and learning, meant to reach out into the world and clarify. How can I do that if I can't exactly reach out?