The dreams this morning were like some kind of weird B-movie. I have been on a remote wilderness journey for weeks or months. I have been traveling alone by canoe down a winding river. This river reminds me of stretches of the Muskegon River here in Michigan. I am alone, making my way, into the heart of darkness.
It is late in the day and I come to an area with a high embankment on the western shore and a wide grassy knoll on the east shore. I have set up camp and pitched my tent up on the high bank near some trees. I get back into my canoe and cross over to the other shore and there is Haki, my sweetheart! She has been waiting for me and has anticipated my arrival. She gives me a big embrace and tells me she wants to take me to the Spanish nun convent for safety's sake and a hot meal.
One minute I am very happy to see my girl, then next thing I hear is gunfire, my camp is being overrun and attacked by female Jihadists! I can hear automatic gunfire and their shrill war cries as they tear up my camp looking to kill me.
Strangely, I am not afraid. I was expecting this might happen. My baby and I get out of there with as much stealth and haste as we can muster.
I transition over into another dream. I am at Camp Grayling again, I served here in the Michigan National Guard, this time I am no longer a soldier and I don't want to be here. I am wearing my old BDU field jacket with jeans and sneakers. I want out of here. I did my service. I am retired. They can fight their damn war without me!
The whole place is full of troops and vehicles getting mobilized to go to Syria. Some Staff Sergeant First Class has caught me trying to sneak out. I have crawled up behind the wheel of a 2 1/2 ton truck. I'm about to steal this truck to make my getaway! "Fuck off, Sarge!" I am not participating. I glare back at the tough old man and then I wake up.
There is something deep in my psyche that really wants to be free from the crazy zealots out there, be they religious or military. There is a deep strong desire to get as far away from these sorts of people as I possibly can.
I spent yesterday in the heart of Chicago getting some important business done toward marrying my sweetheart Haki. You see the screaming homeless man shouting obscenities at his invisible demons with business professionals. The place is a loud bustling hive of people and activity. I was with my dad. He grew up in a small town in Indiana. He grew up in a world that was much more simple and free than today. The environment of the modern city assaults and insults the mind and spirit of the natural man. Throughout this whole trip dad would like about the things he did as kid, such as, his adventures out on his bicycle, and what people and life were like when he was a young man.
I feel like a man with one foot in the past and one foot in the future. Much of who I am comes from my father. I have inherited his old time ways and values, and yet the current of change is sweeping me into a future that has a serious lack of soul and humanity.
Now, as I am fast approach the reality of the day, when I will soon be married and contemplating the prospect of having a wife and children in a broken world, my heart and mind struggles to find a way to preserve the best aspects of my heritage and navigate myself and my loved ones through the minefield of the future. I am of two minds. One part of my wants to go full out hermit and reject the future with it's profane values, and another part of me wants to go down fighting while trying to conserve some of the past. Life and society seems at war with how things used to be. I sometimes wonder if mankind has a death wish.
Carl Jung said, " You know man doesn't stand forever his nullification. Once there will be a reaction. I see that it is a thing in, when I think of my patients, they all seek their own existence to assure their existence against that compete atomization into nothingness or into meaninglessness. Man cannot stand a meaningless life. We need to know an understanding of human nature because he is the only real danger, that exists, is man himself. HE is the great danger! And we are pitifully unaware of it."
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