I don’t know why I am writing this or if it will mean anything to anyone but I’ve been writing about Gandalf lately and asking him for help with the Journey I am on because I get that is his job, you know? He’s the guide. But I am remembering tonight as I try to sleep that a wizard is never early or late and he’s not meant to carry the ring to Mordor. That’s my job.

Again, this might not make sense to anyone who doesn’t get what Tolkien was writing about.

So I wrote a poem yesterday, which I had not planned on sharing with anyone, but maybe someone else can benefit from this, because I did not set off writing this poem expecting another ‘voice’ from within me to respond but that’s what happened, and now I am suddenly realizing not only what that meant but why it had to be ‘said’.

Wake the fuck up, Woden
Show me how to live.
Where the fuck are you hiding?
Haven’t I love to give?
And not a damn person to give it to?
“Ben, everyone is You!
Practice on your goddamn self!
I’m showing you what to do!”

And I thought about this for a long time after I wrote it because I have a ton of self-pride and I tell myself “I love you,” every time I look in the mirror now reflexively, but the love that’s being discussed here isn’t that type of love. I tell an image I love them. I tell who I still think I am that I love them. I still love the me who the external world sees. I am not loving that wounded child in me who keeps fucking up and who is terrified of the world because he’s been hurt so many times. I am loving a persona.

Did you know that word means ‘mask’ in Koine Greek? When an actor put on a mask to perform a Greek drama like The Clouds, the actor would put on a prósōpon, which eventually evolved into persona in Latin once it took over as the primary lingua franca of the Mediterranean. In Old French it was persone and when Normans conquered England they brought it with them and eventually stopped pronouncing the e on the end which is how we get the “Anglish” word ‘person.’

So a person is a mask. Get it? We are all carrying out a Greek Drama. We are masks for The Divine.

It helps me to remind myself of that whenever I think about complaining about something. Instead of doing so, I say to myself. “Who cares? Why would anyone care about that?”

So the trick to navigating the Dark Night of the Soul, (Sol Niger h/t to Chris Cornell, also — Ha ha funny joke, St. John. This shit is lasting fucking YEARS!) is to love yourself, all of you, enough to forgive yourself for your mistakes, past present and future. Embrace the fact that you are human and that to grow you must err. We are here to fuck it up! No one is born perfect! If we had it all figured out there would be no point in coming to this “School of Hard Knocks” would there?

Love you all.

-Benji