Tag: own journal

Since this website is a personal journal more than anything else, I thought I would include an excerpt from my current Oslo Journal as a separate article – notes from a day in my life.

Oslo, Thursday June 11, 2026

SADNESS

I have some sadness come up these days, mixed in with grief and melancholy.

Grief that my parents are gone forever, and especially my father since he died more recently and he, in some ways, meant more for me. It’s a slow quiet grief, and this one is mixed in with gratitude for what he and my parents gave me. They did create an exceptional home filled with art, antiques, frequent gatherings, and lot of nature experiences.

CREATING A LIFE THAT MATCHES MY ISSUES MORE THAN MY MANY GIFTS

There is also some grief that I don’t have a family on my own. I have longed for that, but have not chosen the right partners for it. I didn’t want them to be the mother of my children, which in itself was a clear sign they were not right. The two times I was in a relationship that felt deeply right, I moved it in a direction to end it. Not in a dramatic way, but I made it inevitable. Mostly likely because it felt too good, and it didn’t match feeling unlovable which is quite central to my psyche.

There is grief over missed opportunities in many areas of my life, and knowing that I made myself miss them. It wasn’t circumstances, they were mostly very and sometimes ridiculously favorable. It was my own decisions, it was the trajectory I put myself on because of the issues of being unlovable, not enough, and so on. I created a life that matched those issues as much as it matches the many inner and outer gifts life has given me.

I initially wrote “matches my life more” but that’s not quite true. It all colors my life, and it’s difficult to say that one is more than another.

WHO & WHAT

There is grief, images of the past and what could have been, and so on. Some gentle and familiar contractions in my body. And also a noticing of all of that as space. As made of up of this awake space.

That’s a reminder of my nature, which is a relief and home – and possibly the nature of existence itself. And it doesn’t change my human life and experiences, although it creates a different context for it which does change it in some ways.

MY WOUNDS ARE PART OF MY GIFTS

I wrote that I have created a life that matches my issues more than – or as much as – my many gifts.

That’s true, and it’s also true that my wounds are part of those gifts.

It’s only the human psyche, embedded in this culture, that says differentiates the two in that way. It reflects my culture more than anything else. What my personality likes becomes a gift, and what it doesn’t like becomes something else. That’s not how life itself is.

It’s all part of the same seamless life.

It’s all part of the same seamless awake space that everything is, here and now – what a thought may call sadness, gentle familiar contractions, the music, these arms and hands, this screen, a quiet bliss, images of my parents and my childhood home, images of the two relationships I had that felt deeply right, images of something in me ending them because they didn’t match unlovable, and so on.

ILLUSION?

It’s all space taking all of these forms, and it’s real enough as that.

I get that some call it illusions. It’s dreamlike, made up of the same as dreams. It’s what I am forming itself into all these experiences.

And I don’t really or primarily see it as illusions. Dreamlike, yes. Illusions, not so much. This human life and this Earthly world is real enough, as that. It’s real in the ways dreams are real enough. They are real as an experience.

DREAM

This reminds me of my dream from this morning. I am in a place with several people and a sense of community. An older man, a respected artist, comes, and I realize I am sitting in his chair. I move out of the way. We have a good connection. As I wake up, I sense him as my father, and I am brought back to when I was little and my father would lie down next to me in the bed and I would fall asleep on his arm while he was reading to me. Often adventure books.