Dear Four,
Try to be a friend to yourself if you can.
What does this mean?
I think this means: trying to recognise that if there is an inner monologue happening, no matter how tortured, someone is listening to it. There is always another there (you) listening and available to yourself, some presence you can talk to, someone who notices what you are feeling and sensing. An Inner Guardian, if you like. An Inner Parent of sorts, but without the prejudices of your actual parents, whatever these are or once were.
Who is this Other? I don’t know. Some call it God. My sense of it is that this needs to be a Presence closer to “home” (your inner world) than an externalised deity. What good is a God “out there” for us? Minimal in my experience.
You told me yesterday about listening to your Fellow Four (Nina Simone) singing the hymn “He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands” and your inner pushback against the lyrics of that hymn and the He custodian it refers to.
That is all very well, and still the flies crawl over your legs as you write, and still the hymn is meaningful to some. But perhaps not to you and the Inner Friend. I know the two of you prefer something like “Abide With Me”, where the word Lord can be changed to Life or Love, or any other word that holds some spiritual value for the two of you. This hymn is part of your daily liturgy, is that right? This and Dream Lover, amongst others. Very Four.
I know the loneliness of your Ego Cage is sometimes overwhelming. Have you read Kafka’s diaries? There is a new translation out by Ross Benjamin which I think you might like. I was doing a search through the electronic version of it the other day for “lonely” words, including Isolation, Solitude, Rejection, Abandonment, Emptiness, Sadness, Despair, and one of your favourites, Longing, when I came across this passage:
““I have now and already had in the afternoon a great longing to write my whole anxious condition wholly out of me and just as it comes out of the depths to write it into the depths of the paper or to write it down in such a way that I can incorporate what I’ve written fully into me. This is no artistic longing. ”
No it isn’t. It is a longing to talk with your Inner Friend. I would suggest a genuine, vocalised dialogue.
Try to let them get to know you, as well as to take note of all the beauty in this world where it is present, even if this beauty and to stand next to you when you are suffering with an arm around your shoulder, saying: explain more, and why this and not that, and is this always the case?
Hold onto everything that is good within you (your sensitivity, your awareness, your depth of understanding) and see if these qualities, which your Inner Friend has too, might be experienced on the receiving end of your consciousness, the psyche residing in your awareness.
With love,
Steve