Monday, December 29, 2008

Meltdown!

Literally!
We accumulated over 2 feet of snow and enjoyed an amazing and gorgeous "white Christmas". Just beautiful.
We've been mostly inside for days and I am feeling some cabin fever. You know, I don't like to use quotation marks! They make me grumpy.
The view from my big bathtub window has changed drastically in 2 days. No more winterwonderland. Now it's bare trees, greenery, small patches of snow, brown earth and large puddles of water. It's also raining hellaciously and loudly as I write. Meltdown!
I may be having one of my own. I love to stay home, I really do. I may have had too much of it over the past couple of weeks though.
I feel restless and a bit cranky. Want to go somewhere. See someone, something new.

I've been reading this morning in my VanGogh Blues book. Very insightful for me. The connections between creativity and depression.
The passages I focused on today were about addictions. Saw myself so very clearly there and here:

"The Bound Man" by Austrian author, Ilse Aichinger, in which a man awakens one morning to find himself inexplicably bound by rope. Instead of removing the rope at the first opportunity, he spontaneously decides to become a circus attraction.

Whew! I know this one!

from the book....."the addict, also inexplicably bound to his addiction, finds, like the bound man, important reasons not to fight the addiction. While he is bound up, he is less free, but he is also less anxious. Bound this way, there are so many things that he can't dream of doing------ so many powerful limitations!-------- which he experiences as liberation."
Whew! again! I feel a little sick and somewhat ashamed and somehow found-out! My dirty little secret may not be my own......

from the book....."the bound creator becomes devoted to his addiction and loses his ability to live authentically.
He may become bound to anything: stock trading, Star Trek conventions, painting in a single style. He may become bound to consuming peanuts by the pound, like Orson Welles, who claimed to hate peanuts. She may become bound to planting flowers, like May Sarton, who likened her gardening to an addiction.
When you want to train your mind over here (where the real meaning is to be made), but your mind goes over there (to a happy place of peanuts, flowers, gin or poker chips), you've become an addict.

OK. I live in the happy place of peanuts.

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