The Refuge of the Soul

Life’s a storm.  It’s very difficult.  It’s not always easy to find shelter in this place.  Very little works out, and it never lets up.  Life never gets easier.  It only gets more difficult.  The thing that makes it all worth it is that the rewards become greater and greater as you move through life, and when things are lined up properly, the good easily outweighs the bad.  That’s our gift, and the world really is our oyster.

When you’re a kid you have no responsibilities and relationships are easy.  Homework is your worst problem, and you meet new friends every day.  You have no debt, and everything is free. As a kid, you don’t notice the most important thing that compels your day-to-day happiness, which is your family.  You get that for free too.

As you get older, friends become more difficult to meet, and your responsibilities start to become numerous.  At a certain point, you become aware that your big picture goals and your fulfillment is being tested by hard times.  You notice your goals require serious diligence to actualize which only complicates the now mounting difficulties in your life.  You start to give up on fair weather friends as you start to concentrate on the few people you feel give you support and value.  You realize that it’s no one’s job to support you or be there for you.  It’s just a fact of life that everyone is just taking care of their own life and doesn’t owe you anything.  In the end, basically no one really cares about you in the way you need, except for possibly your family.  That is, if you’re lucky and it was lined up right.

Then at a certain point, the original pillars of your support system, like family and childhood friends, start to fade away.  The big pillars die off.  Your grandparents pass on, and then your parents pass on.  This is the slow peeling back of your original free support system, and you must then replace it with a support system that you create on your own.  Christmas used to be tons of parents, uncles, and aunts, right?  If you want that big family Christmases again, it’s no longer free.  You must make that family.

You must then create a support system that is primarily or solely built of family if you want to every feel home again.  It will be a new family as an extension of your original family.  Then you can have those big Passover meals again.  Then you can have those warm Thanksgiving meals again.  Only then will Christmas feel like Christmas again.  Those people will care about you and need you the way that no one else could.  It’s no one else’s job.  As your original support system fades, you must make your own anew from scratch… physically.  You literally must make your own family and a place where you belong by becoming whole and creating a it.  Then you teach the kids to do the same.

I completely understand how obvious this stuff is when you hear it out loud, and that’s my point.  It’s obvious, yet no one ever sat us down and talked to us about how hard life would become.  They didn’t tell us how to find shelter in the storm.  The family is the refuge of the Soul.  The family unit has all the larger fulfilling events that make life worth it and keep the good times out-weighing the bad.  And trust me, the good times can easily outweigh the bad.

Some examples of fulfilling, high-note moments would be events like seeing your child be born, watching your son’s piano recital, opening Christmas gifts with 20 other family members, family vacations, family movie night, eating dinner with loved ones every night, watching your daughter get married, the father/bride dance, meeting your grandchildren, and simply having a place where you belong in this world.

Those feelings and journeys don’t just happen for free like we assumed when we were kids.  They must be created, and there’s a path that must be followed to hit those high notes.  Basically, all the greatest moments offered to us are on the path of family.  Within the promise of modernity and progress, we’re not shown that path.  It’s hidden from us, yet it’s the most important path.  Many people find later in life that they’re left out in the storm.  The rain never stops, but it could’ve been much easier for them.

Modern society leads the children astray.  In the story “Pinocchio”, the children grow donkey ears and become slaves after being lured off to focus on fun and avoiding responsibility.  Abusive figures lead them astray by convincing the children to make bad decisions, and we lead our children astray by not telling them what’s import in life.  It’s highly important to seek shelter from loneliness and nasalism.

Family is the refuge of the Soul!  Pinocchio’s friend, who dies as an enslaved donkey, has the name of Lucignolo which ironically sounds like the modern term YOLO.  It’s a coincidence though and actually it translates to Lampwick.  Go back and watch Pinocchio again after you finish this conversation and you’ll see this message.  His father is the only one that cared about him in the end.  Pinocchio father always wanted a son and needed a child to fulfill his life.  None of this is new.

Why were we never talked to about this?  It’s one of the most important of all lessons.  Family and blood line are unrivaled in importance.  Why is this not taught in schools from a very young age.  In ways, it’s a combination of laziness and nasalism which have possessed the parents of the world.  They avoid this most basic of lessons to their children because the lesson wasn’t given to them.  Like any cycle of abuse, they were abused by careless subscribers to modernity, and they pass that abusive reality as normality to their children.  I also see a great evil in the world that hates beauty and fights against the Tree of life.  This most valuable of lessons is that evil’s Acylase heel.

If we just focus on the lesson of family, and we will, we’ll push back the darkness into the night for a thousand more years and be at peace again.  The turmoil in the world is directly related to the distance and cold space inside the family unit.  Family is really all you have, and heaven really isn’t that far away.  You’ll learn that in one way or another as you move through life and the later you learn that, the more likely you’ll be eaten by the nothingness.

I’ll tell you one thing that helped me learn.  Daphne was born on April 27, 2012.  Her full name is Daphne Eleanor Bagot Von Slippy-Slop Pancake Face 2012 Edition.   She’s my best friend.  When I got her, she was smaller than a cantaloupe!  She was fat and her head was shaped funny.  I took her to work every day, and she slept in my lap hidden under my desk.  When she got too big, she laid across my feet all day at the office and kept them warm.  I watched every movie with her and held her like a teddy bear for almost 2890 days.

I had a motorcycle accident which broken my leg, and I couldn't walk for about three months.  She laid beside me the entire 3 months while basically none of my friends visited me.  And since then, all those friends faded away.  When I was sick, she was there.  When I was lonely, she was there.  When I would come home drunk, she kept me warm.  It's like she knew I was drunk.  She'd meet me at the door at 3am.  She taught me how to love, how to be selfless, and how to depend on someone else.  I don't think I knew how to love someone before her.  I had never seen that before I don't think.

She’s a character, and her favorite thing is wearing her pink sweater and walking through Home Depot to beg for treats.  She was a ruthless, dirty, rotten beggar.  She was the softest thing ever, and the demeanor in her eyes was that of a child mixed with an elder sage.  She was the warmer of worlds, and a stealer of bacon.  I didn't know what tense to put this writing in, but I figured it would work itself out.  She was a fancy fawn boxer canine.  I love you Daphne Eleanor!

I thought she would live a long time, and it really didn't cross my mind that she would ever go.  Or I assumed at lease she would be maybe 10 or 12 when her time came.  She won't be making it to her 8th birthday though.  I took her to the doctor about a month ago because her leg was hurt, and they informed me that she had late-stage lung cancer, and she wouldn't be making it much more than 4 or 5 months.  11 medications and 3 chemo therapies later, it turns out that the cancer was much more powerful than we thought, and she's quickly winding down after only a month and a half.  She’s coughing more and more, and she's drifting away.  You need to understand that you’ll go through this in your life.  Your friends don’t care. Your coworkers don’t care. Politicians don’t care.  Only your family can care about you the way you need when it comes down to it.

I'm keeping it together because it hasn't really hit me yet.  I was pretty sad when I first heard, but a person can't be catatonic for months on end and that would be a pretty sad last time with her.  So, I just got over it and vowed to fight it with her.  We've hung out a lot, and the time has been great as it always is.  But it's going to completely wreck my life when she is gone.  With her dies my whole crew and all of my friends.  Basically no one knows me anymore and probably hasn't for over a decade or more now.  There are pretty much only acquaintances at this point.  Don’t worry about me though, I have a secret and I’ll be fine.  But it still sucks.  Don't hang your only hat on a moving train car.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m the biggest dog person you know.  I will always have a dog or two.  I’m seeing in our experiment with modernity, people attempt to replace family with dogs and cats.  People refer to their dogs as their children in an obvious attempt to mimic a divine purpose in life.  People get multiple cats so as they die, they can cycle through them without gaps in emotional support.  They talk to their pets like humans because it's our nature to express ourselves and be understood.  I do lots of that kind of stuff too by the way.  But when they turn to gold and fly away as they are called, you need to have placed bigger rocks in the river to step onto next.

People try and replace the need for a family in all kind of ways like having drinking friends and drug buddies.  They drink every weekend because it creates a facade of a group of people that is there for us with some consistency.  Some people focus on careers where coworkers and hierarchy mimics family structure and belonging, but can ultimately drive them from having that role in a real family.  They seek validation from work status and coworkers.  Street gang recruitment is based highly off of offering lost children family structure.  In all kinds of ways people waste valuable years that they could have been a part of something real.

Here is the point of all this.  We live in a very isolated world, or lots of us do.  I don't know how it got to this point, but it's just not right.  You never hear about the isolation, but it’s uncanny and rampant.  We fill our time with socialization, work, and floating from one setting to another.  We have very quaint private lives that most of us spend alone.  We're heavily encouraged to focus on aspects of life other than family, and often we end up with no one understanding us or caring about us.

I love Daphne, I don't know if I would even be here without her, but pets are made to be our companions and teach us love, but they are fleeting.  I think this is why they only last about 10 years.  If they lived as long as us, we could recluse into their hearts and be content until our passing.  But the Tree of Life doesn't work like that.  Dogs teach us how to love and have supportive relationships, and then that new understanding MUST be executed and applied to a family unit or you’ll simply find yourself standing back out in the storm.  You don’t belong in the storm alone.

Pets are amazing family members, but can't replace family.  The human branch of the Tree of Life wouldn't grow if we didn't have to deal with each other, which is much more difficult that a pet.  A girl would have left me a lot time ago for coming home drunk like that.  We need to encourage children and younger people that family is the most important aspect of their emotion well-being and long-term fulfillment.  We leave them to find that out on their own in their 30s far past an immense amount of loneliness and mistakes.

That's modernity in a nutshell.  It's catastrophic and breeds nasalism.  Yet, this is called progress.  How Orwellian.  We should be teaching children to value and seek the stability of a family unit at a much younger age.  We would be much better off as a species if we had a society where people sought the shelter of family anywhere from 18 to 22.  Or at least before 25.

We teach children the avoidance of family for the sake of school and careers, which is even worse of an idea than trying to replace a family with cats.  Lots of people out there were taught that an office cubical can replace your child hugging your leg, and that taking care of yourself when you’re sick is great cause you’re challenging the norm.  And no one told them any differently.  Now they’re in their late 20s and 30s, and they’re alone.  No one cares about them.  Do you want that for children?

Our society marches these people through public education, through college, into a career, into a cubical, and never tells them that it won't make them happy.  Family is more valuable than career and personal achievement.  If you've never been told that and told to focus on building your family, then no one ever cared about you in that way.  And that's wrong.  It's abusive to push a child through a machine and into a cubical.  If you understand what I'm talking about then you must understand, you are a product of nasalism.  It's a generational degradation and I say enough with it.

We’re going to fix it with the gift we were given.  It's ok, all we have to do is break the cycle and move back towards more family-oriented public conversation. We must talk to the children about what’s truly important in life.  We must break the cycle and in ways admit that modernity can't replace our basic imperatives.  Take the love you learned from your pet and apply it to a real human that needs it as soon as possible.  Sober up and start a family.  And if you can't have kids, find someone who wants to adopt and build a later stage family to be a shelter for a lost child… and you.  Family is the refuge of the soul.

Remember the true Alpha doesn’t necessarily confront others, the true Alpha confronts himself or herself.  Thank you for reading and thank you for being a part of my life!  If you think this was at all interesting, give me some feedback and read some of my other pieces.  Like and subscribe.  And don’t forget…

To wake the Lion!