To a word, that's almost exactly what my shrink said to me yesterday. Which to a Virgo looks like the most daunting of tasks EVER. What does it even mean? What is happy without some pursuit of an Ideal stirred into it? Happy is having Faith. And Faith comes into my existence materially in my relation to others, where it is tried and proven. Making pesto is a spiritual practice. Or so I believe(d). But. I put too much Faith in Aaron, not in the sense that he failed me but in the sense that I located my own Faith in another too much and I don't know how not to do that. I know (believe) that what people call God is actually indwelling, it is at the base of ourselves a little portal through which we are suffused with Everything more or less to the degree we can keep that open, the 'transparent eyeball'. And yet in practice, my own portal lies elsewhere inside others, outside my own control. I can control it when I am alone but then after a while it feels about the size of a peehole in the snow. Is that a problem of motherhood? Of loverhood? Of idealized friendship? (Am I just retarded?) (I'm probably just retarded.)
"You decide how you will feel. Not him." What am I? The Dali Fucking Lama? I don't think so. "You know it's true. I'm not making excuses for him or letting him off the hook of work. But torturing yourself is a choice you're making." (And I think about my thinking, how the sound of his pants coming off then hitting the floor and the belt buckle clangs on the tile, that familiar sound sequence sends a wave of sickgrief washing over me, his hands about to be on someone else in my head, the time it took him to unbuckle are the seconds in which he might have thought of me and stopped instead...it's true, I'm making that up and torturing myself with it...hotel rooms are carpeted anyway...) I don't know how to stop. "You're rushing a grief process, which is only going to prolong it; accept your grief as grief, pure and simple, it doesn't have to take any other shape of thought, you don't have to put it in order so you can put it away."
OK so today is today. I'm going to make one of my sister's recipes for a late dinner with Aaron, which for me will only tangentially have anything to do with food as such, though the degree to which I will take care to make it come out delicious will be the degree to which I am drawing love/strength from my sister into me through that process, and the degree to which I will be deciding to be happy today pouring my love materially into Aaron and feeling good that it's there working it's way through his guts. I'm still not sure how to make that an "exchange of parity" (?), but I suppose I could at least be more transparent. From now on, the answer to the daily question "what's for dinner?" is: Idealization, it's what's for dinner. (Or pizza.)
