Eucatastrophe Reader

This is your Brain On an Injury

It seems like everyone has a book for me to read these days. And the problem with that is that I have books everywhere right now. Every one of them is saying "read me". For example, I had a good conversation with my neighbor the other day about the effects of vaccines on children and learning disorders. She mentioned to me that the theory was that there were some bad batches of vaccine. Not that all vaccines were detrimental (But some people would say "Why take the risk?") She indicated that from the looks of educational testing that was done on my own kids that whatever "issues" they might have (And I would NEVER think of them as disabilities) are most likely genetic.

Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath

Michael Paul Mason

Anyway, she brought over a book yesterday entitled Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and It's Aftermath by Michael Mason. It is about stories of people with brain injuries and what they have to tell us about brains and about the human mind and maybe even about that aspect of us that may not be just brain tissue.

"Head Cases takes us into the dark side of the brain in an astonishing sequence of stories, at once true and strange, from the world of brain injury.

Michael Paul Mason is one of an elite group of experts who appear in the wake of tragic accidents and coordinate care that can last a lifetime. On the road with Mason, we encounter survivors of brain injuries as they struggle to map and make sense of the new worlds they inhabit. We meet a snowboarder whose life became permanently surreal after an errant jump; an "ultraviolent" child who has lost the brain's instinctive check on the impulse to strike out at others; a young man who cannot cry; and an Iraq war veteran whose odd maladies suggest that brain injury will be the war's most conspicuous legacy.

Underlying each of their stories is an exploration into the brain and its mysteries. When injured, the brain must figure out how to heal itself, reorganizing its physiology in order to do the job, and Mason gives us a series of vivid glimpses into brain science, the last frontier of medicine. We come away in awe of the miracles of the brain's workings and astonished at the fragility of the brain and the sense of self, life, and order that resides there. Head Cases echoes both Oliver Sacks and Raymond Carver, and is at once illuminating and deeply affecting."

I wish I had a big fat grant that I could draw from to pay my son, Skyler to read books for me as I am finding myself overwhelmed with curiosity about everything right now. And I have one book that I have set in the middle of the floor so that I can't forget it that I finished and have to write a report on. Grin.

They say that the human brain only functions at a fraction of its capacity. That has always mystified me. I have wondered how a human brain could evolve way more capacity than it used ... or conversely why a creator would give it way more capacity than He made available to us? And it makes me wonder if the human brain sustained some sort of ... I don't know ... brain injury at some point in time in our history? And what would it have been like to think with such a brain before the injury? What would it be like if I were to slowly "recover" from such a brain injury and begin to use more of my brain that I had ever used.? Would that be fun? would it be scary? Would it feel like craziness? Would it make me lonely?

I saw a preview for a movie last night. The movie was called Blindness. And I think the tagline goes something like this "The only thing scarier than going blind is finding out that you are the only one who can see." I wonder what it would be like to be seeing out of a healed brain ... or even a healing brain. Would a person feel incredibly lonely?

I mean one can imagine having a sibling ... someone you have grown up with and someone you love who just isn't seeing the world the way you can because your brain is healing but theirs for some reason isn't?

It all sounds like Science Fiction but it seems like it would make for a great story if someone had time to write it. Has anyone with a good background in brain science ever written a novel that played with what it would be like to think with a totally functioning brain?

For years, I have wondered just what it would be like to "see" out of a catamount's head. I mean, physiologically and neurologically, you KNOW that they are seeing things that you or I do not see. How would it change our perception of the world if just briefly, we could look out of a head like a catamount or a falcon? I am just speculating here but it seems like if I woke up with a catamount's brain and eyes and sense ... I would find myself overwhelmed with the additional data that my brain was being fed. Just overwhelmed. Like I would just be getting WAY more visual input than I was used to and it would exaust me just trying to manage it all.

How does a catamount prioritize its information I ask myself? How does it know what to screen out? (And this reminds me of a book my son keeps telling me I HAVE to read. It is called Feed.

"In this chilling novel, Anderson (Burger Wuss; Thirsty) imagines a society dominated by the feed a next-generation Internet/television hybrid that is directly hardwired into the brain. Teen narrator Titus never questions his world, in which parents select their babies' attributes in the conceptionarium, corporations dominate the information stream, and kids learn to employ the feed more efficiently in School." Review at Amazon.com

I wonder ... if we ever figure out what happened to our brains, if something did in fact happen to them ... what the process of healing it will be? And what schools would look like in a world where the healing of that brain and the use of that healed brain was the central mission? 

My son Sim's book recommendation to me today was The Cat Who Brought Down the House

The Cat Who Brought Down the House

Lilian Jackson Braun

Question for Comment: What do you think? Have we humans come to think of life with a brain injury as normal? Would we regard people with "healed" fully functional brains as crazy? What would be going on in their heads that would not be going on in ours? All sorts of good questions today.

This is a test. this is only a test.

My good friend Tom sent this one to me today and I thought I would pass it on:

Read this question, come up with an answer and then scroll down to the bottom for the result. This is not a trick question. It is as it reads. No one I know has gotten it right.

While at the funeral of her own mother, a woman met a man whom she did not know. She thought he was 'amazing.' She believed him to be her dream partner so much that she fell in love with him right there, but never asked for his number and could not find him. A few days later she killed her sister.

Question: What was her motive for killing her sister?

Give this some thought before you answer, see answer below.

 

Answer:

She was hoping the guy would appear again at her sister's funeral. If you answered this correctly, you think like a psychopath. This was a test developed by a famous American psychologist, used to test if one has the same mentality as a killer.

Many arrested serial killers took part in the test and answered the question correctly.

If you didn't answer the question correctly, good for you.

If you got the answer correct, please let me know so I can take you off my e-mail list.

Have you ever felt like life has given you a test? I mean a tough test? One so tough you hesitate to celebrate passing it because you are afraid that another page of it will be delivered the next day and you can't imagine it getting any tougher? Like if you get a tougher test, it will kill you? Anyway, to all those out there in blog-land who have recently passed a test of any kind, I celebrate you. Seriously. Nice work.

Question for discussion: If you were put in a situation where you thought the only way that you would ever find your true love in life involved being willing to hurt someone, would you?

In the OTHER Beginning

My son was playing with words in Biology class the other day and this was the result.

1 Nothing made the heaven and earth. 2 The earth was without forms, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the wind just happened to move over the face of the waters. 3 And an evolutionist thought, "let there be life"; and there was life. 4 And the evolutionist saw that the life was simple; and the evolutionist separated the strong from the weak. 5 The evolutionist called the strong survivors, and the weak he called dead. And there was the producers and the consumers, one way. 6 and the evolutionist said "There happens to be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and it perchance separates the waters from the waters."

 7 And it also happened perchance that the firmament was there, the separation of the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. And it was by chance. 8 And the evolutionist called the firmament nonexistant. And there was survivors and deceased, a second generation. 9 and the evolutionist said "Let the waters begin to evaporate, and let dry land appear." and by chance it happened. 10 The evolutionist termed the dry land Pangaea, and the waters that had not evaporated he called Seas. And the evolutionist saw that it was by chance.

11 And the evolutionist said, "On the Pangea let vegetation come forth, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, but none according to its kind as all were in process, upon the earth." And it was by chance.

Its interesting that he and I are studying Creation Stories in World History right now. I am realizing lately that so much depends on the narrative that we tell ourselves about what has happened to us. If that narrative is out of sinc with what actually happened, it creates a LOT of problems for us because we will continue to act as though we have learned from our past what we were never intended to learn. In a real sense, we do not know who we are if we do not know what really happened to us. We get totally fouled up because we start applying lessons we learn that are basically untrue. I mean ... what if the lesson I learn from an experience is "There is something wrong with you" when the lesson I was supposed to learn is "You should not let your opportunity to act slip by" ALL because my narrative of what happened is not in alignment with what did happen?

Essentially, we then start living someoen else's life. A person we imagine ourselves to be. And if our lives are out of allignment with who we are, we have to expect frustration as our lives will not be organic expressions of ourselves. 

This week's discussion should give us the opportunity to see how whole cultures were created from creation stories.

Question for Comment: What are three questions about your past that you would like to go back and visit and get more accurately than you think you understand now? 

"A friend is one ..."

". . . who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us. The friend asks no return but that his friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace his apotheosis of him. They cherish each other's hopes. They are kind to each other's dreams." - Henry David Thoreau

"Apotheosis (from Greek ἀποθεόω, apotheoō "to deify"), deification or divinization is the glorification of an individual to a divine level." - Wikipedia

Jesus once asked one of his friends "Do you love me?"

If I had been Peter, I might have said "Of course I do. I whacked off that rackin frackin varmaint's ear with my trusty sword didn't I?" ;-)

Yosemitesam

I just find it so interesting that Jesus managed to connect so profoundly with a friend like John, a disciple who was the sort to basically just lay his head on Jesus' lap, purr like a contented kitten, and fall asleep. But then also to connect with a guy like Peter who was sort of a cross between Errol Flynn and Yosemite Sam. I can be so impulsive sometimes. So intense. All I can do is say that I have friends of whom it is easy for me to say "They cherish my hopes. They are kind to my dreams." And someday, I would hope that they could say the same of me. I know I am trying.

Question for Comment: Do you have friends (or a friend) who's expectation of you, whose belief in you (despite what they know about you) causes you to rise to a better version of yourself than you were living before they came into your life? 

This Home That I'll Be In

The other day, someone said that they would like to see some more pictures of my home. It occurred to me that my house where I live is not exactly what I would call my home. I wrote a poem about this feeling tonight and titled it This House that I Live In.

This House that I Am Inn

This house that I am inn has traits
Of the Home I would someday like.
This house that I am inn has exposed beams
And I would like to see what is “underneath”
In the home I would someday like.
This house that I am inn has lots of light in some of its rooms
Like I would like in all the rooms in a home that I would like.
This house that I am in nhas a nice pantry but not nice enough
To feed the many people that would come to
the home that I would like.
This house that I am inn is full of book shelves
Almost half as many as I would like in
A home that I would like.
This house that I am inn has cats leftover from
a former relationship
And I don’t think they will be there in the home that I would like.
This house that I am inn burns oil
And the home that I would like will burn wind and sun.
This house that I am inn has lots of my art on the walls
While the home that I would like would have ours.
This house that I am inn contains just me tonight
And that will not be so in the home that I would like.

Which I will be part of and not just inn.

Larson Dining Room

The house that I am in feels less like my home than my parents home or some of my friend's homes. I think what I should rather do here - rather than posting pictures of my house is post some pictures that my son and I took at my friends, the Larson's home last night. It was their son Job's 21rst birthday and dancing teachers were invited to teach a class for anyone in the family or out that showed up (And at the Larson's, there are several people who have acquired family status by simply showing up to be loved and to love). 

I confess, not having a partner, I stayed downstairs for the dance and wrote some emails and played pool with Simeon. But the following meal and conversations were delightful and I would like to take this opportunity to tell Rich and Cynthia and their family that "they are the gems". I know it takes a lot of work and sacrifice to maintain this womb of frequent happiness (and opportunities to grow) but ... I think many people in this world are looking for homes with soul. Thanks. Kudos to my son Sim, who looks at the world he lives in with eyes of wonder, for the pictures he took of the dancers. They remind me of a Degas or a Renoir painting.

Larson Dance VI

Kiera

Larsons Dance

Larsons Dance III

Larsons Window

Larson Living Room

Larson Kitchen

 

Larsons Back Porch

Larsons Picnic

Question for Comments: What sorts of things would help you make your house a home?

What Dreams May Come

Ten years ago, I began creating a plan for a program called STORYTELLER, a piece of software that would allow people to dream and share dreams in community. Following are some notes I took in my thinking about this endeavor.

Dream Reading Notes

"Christians often ask why God does not speak to them, as he is believed to have done in former days. . . . We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions. The Christian puts his church and his Bible between himself and his unconscious. . . . I doubt whether there is a Protestant treatise or doctrine that would stoop so low as to admit the possibility that the Vox Dei [Voice of God] might be perceived in a dream. It seems almost incredible that though we receive signals from it every night, deciphering those communications seems too tedious for any but a very few people to be bothered with it. Man's greatest instrument, His psyche is little thought of and often directly mistrusted and despised. 'It's only psychological' often means 'it is nothing.'" (Jung, p.102)

 "The self usually appears in dreams at crucial times in the dreamer's life - turning points where his basic attitudes and whole way of life are changing. The change itself is often symbolized by crossing water." (Jung, p. 198)

 "Synchronous events moreover almost invariably accompany the crucial phases of the process of individuation. But too often they pass unnoticed because the individual has not learned to watch for such coincidences and to make them meaningful in relation to the symbolism of his dreams." (p.211)

 "To follow in the steps of a great spiritual leader does not mean that one should copy and act out the pattern of the individuation process made by his life. It means that we should try with a sincerity and devotion equal to to his to live our own lives." (Yung, p. 217)

 "It often happens that when a person tries to obey the unconscious, he must separate from his group-from his family-his partner, and other personal connections- in order to find himself." (p.219)

 "But in man the animal being (which lives in him as his instinctual psyche) may become dangerous if it is not recognized and integrated in life. Man is the only creature with the power to control his instinct by his own will but he is also able to suppress, distort, and wound it and an animal, to speak metaphorically, is never so wild and dangerous as when it is wounded. Suppressed instincts can gain control of a man. They can even destroy him. (Jung, p. 239)

 "A dream that has not been interpreted is like a letter that has not been opened." Talmud

 "It is this inherent 'radical' open, wholeness-seeking quality of dreams which explains in large measure why even those religious and philosophical traditions that emblazon dreamwork (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Freudian Psychology) have all abandoned the actual practice of paying serious attention to dreams, despite their acknowledged traditional importance. Sustained dreamwork always calls into question the fixed beliefs and ideologies of prematurely closed experience and thought (even when dreams were the initial inspiration of those beliefs and ideology). Once an idea or religious institution becomes frozen in an institutional form, the continued criticism and creative innovation offered by dream work becomes "heresy" and dreams themselves become suspect, persecuted, and ultimately repressed and ignored." (Jeremy Taylor, p. 18)

 Page 21 makes it clear that research demonstrates that dreaming is crucial to mental health whether remembered or not. (Man shall not live by bread alone)

 "To me dreams are a part of nature, which harbors no intent to deceive, but expresses something as best it can." Carl Yung

 "When we deny something, some energy or potential within, we do not destroy that energy or potential; on the contrary by denying it a place in the pool of light shed by our conscious attention and forcing it to live it's life in the dark, we free it to roam around and act at will, beyond our conscious awareness and control. . . . We begin to see the very things which we are denying in ourselves as the exclusive property of others around us."

 In the chapter on death and dreams: "In my experience all dream deaths are related at one level or another to the growth and transformation of personality. It is as though the old structure of personality which is being altered as a result of increasing maturity must die in order to make way for the new. Often this death is experienced as a death in the dream." (Taylor, 65)

 "My experience with explicitly sexual dreams where the experience is happy, pleasurable, or rapturous is that there tends to be an association between these dreams and the greater recognition and resolution of philosophical and spiritual concerns." (i.e. explicitly sexual positive dreams may be an indication that some spiritual "connection" has been made). p. 147

 "The appearance of stupidity is inevitably a late development, resulting from the imposition of premature closure on the inherently open mental/conceptual abilities of the young child. And a little child shall lead them . . . Only as you become a child again." The basic message of radical Christianity - "love your enemies is an affirmation of the ultimate unity of all phenomena. At the level of individual psychology, the admonition 'love your enemies' is the only practical solution to the universal problem of repression and projection. All of those whom we perceive to be our enemies both asleep and awake are at this vitally important level simply images of our own capacity for evil which we have denied and repressed, and are thus perceiving in others." (p227)

Questions for Comment: Can you think of ways that dreams have advised you, healed you, warned you, taught you, scolded you, or just entertained you?

"Friendship is the sacred obligation that binds"

MidtownIraElders

A friend of mine was talking to me recently about "breaking the cycle" in her family. Actually, TWO different friends have been talking to me about the same thing. Both of them have conveyed to me how important it has been to them to see to it that the cycles of abuse or neglect stop in their generation. they have taken two different approaches though. One has decided to have a lot of kids and raise them in a way completely different from what they grew up with. the other has decided (to this point) not to have children at all. Both inspire me in many ways. And I can honestly say that I think it is probably good that EVERY generation consider what cycles of family they want to see continued and what cycles they want to see eliminated or modified.

As a historian and a History teacher, I consider it one of my principle tasks and missions in life to help people discover the sources of the programming in their family or cultural history that they want to change. Once people know the source of a thought pattern or a habit pattern or an attitude pattern, it is so much easier to say "Oh! Well if a human started it a human can change it." I love the story about the little girl who asked her mom why she cut the ends off her ham before baking it. Mom said, "Because my mom did." So they asked gramma and she said "Because my mom did." So they asked great gramma, and she said "Because my pan was too small".

I myself feel like I have a mission to try and start fresh. Maybe its harder for me because I came from such a great family. But there are still things I want to see done differently. And have done differently. What is so interesting about my own quest for cycle breaking is just how full throttle I have been about it. I have not just gone back into my folks lives, I have gone back to the 1500's. I have something like 1400 people in my genealogy database that I have tried to get the scoop on.

http://users.adelphia.net/~vtpanther/myweb/CrossmanGeneology/crossmangeneology.htm

I have wanted to trace the roots of where everything come s from.

“The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving and inventory. Therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.” Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

What fun about this is that I know the date on which my great great great ... grandparents were converted in a revival in Middletown Vermont (early 1800's) . I have read numerous sermons by the pastor in whose church they were converted. I have a book written by that pastor, in his own handwriting (dated 1792) outlining his whole epistimology - the sources for why he believed what he believed (he was having a debate with the Green Mountain Boy Ethan Allen crowd at the time over the subject of Biblical revelation). I also have this same pastor's 200 some odd page journal from the time he was 14 to the time he began pastoring in Middletown, including the description, in his own writing, of the revival that my ancestors (A Revolutionary War Vet named Jonathan Haynes and his wife Lydia Haskins) were brought into his pastoral care in. I even have a map of the seating arrangement in the church that shows exactly where in the building they sat! (Back then people paid for their pew boxes like condo time shares). I have sermons he wrote that describe his views about war, his views about family, his views about money, his views about politics, etc. etc. etc.

In short, I have a really good set of resources for examining just where the powerful coding that has influenced my own family and me came from. It is a pretty rare gift. The above picture depicts some of these ancestors of mine (not the Revolutionary war guy unfortunately) But I know exactly where they all lived in town. As a matter of fact, my kids, providentially lived just about in their front yard for a few years.

I suspect that we ALL can be about this task. We all feel the surging need of our time to break the cycles that are literally killing us and destroying us. History teachers can help. If only they will understand what their mission is to society. Like intergenerational psychologists, they can help people get back to the origins of their lousey programming.

A few years ago, in a stack of old papers in a drawer in an unused filing cabinet in town, I found a sermon that was published in about 1808 by Sylvanus Haynes, the pastor of whom I speak. It was the dedication sermon of the brand new Baptist Church in town  ... anyway, as I was saying, in that sermon, Haynes wrote:

"Let us remember that friendship is the pleasing bond that unites empires, states, societies, and families together; and that without this agreeable and powerful tie, all others will be of no avail. Without this the largest empires would crumble, states divide, and churches and societies break up, and families perpetually jar; To prevent which, in vain may a church have recourse to covenants, articles of faith, and gospel discipline: For friendship is the sacred obligation that binds . . .

... and if we do not in some degree walk in love and union, I solemnly denounce unto you today, that God will remove our candlestick out of this place; and then this fair structure will only be a lasting monument of our disgrace. For if brotherly love shall not continue, it is impossible to produce any lasting substitute to supply its place; and animosities, divisions, and ruin must be the inevitable consequence."

This guy may have been wrong about a number of things but he was right about this. By the way, the Baptist church he was dedicating is now referred to as "the potato barn" and is now used as a town garage and storage garage for a local carpenter - Quite sad actually. The building is about two hundred years old. You can still see the nice mouldings and everything inside. They have snow plow chains hanging off them. It occurs to me that it would be fun to ressurect the place. I know a carpenter who is good at building things like that. Grin.

Question for Comment: In what way are you presently on a search for old programming in your family? How are you replacing it? How might a community of friends help?   

"Wold's best mom ... clean car to prove it"

Mom Car

It is as good a time as any to celebrate my mom. My life has been a bit intense lately and when I get mentally intense, my external life starts to disintegrate sometimes. Not in horrendous ways but ... you can see clutter starting to accumulate like cholesterol in the different nooks and crannies of my house and car. My car! You don't even want to know what a summer of wet towels and bathing suits can do to an otherwise normal clean car.

So, today, my mom stops by to help me. and she says "I'll clean the car." This woman is a saint. a veritable saint I tell you. She just pulled everything out, put everything wet and unpleasant in a HUGE parachute size garbage bag and took it home to wash. And now, I have a clean car (For the record, I was inside cleaning myself the whole time). Well then my sister stops by and I basically had to beat her back into her car to keep her from stealing my "slave."  I said if she wanted to though, she could come in and clean my house with me. Should have seen the look THAT suggestion got. Grin.

But seriously, I have a great mom and I love her to pieces. I loaned her the movie I watched the other day, The Lost Prince, about this mother who basically ignores her son because he is different and my mom was telling me she watched it and she said "I just wanted to bop that mother on the head." Grin. My mom is never violent but ... mothers who ignore their children for being different are not on her "Father forgive them for they know not what they do" list. Fortunately, little prince Johnny had a brother that loved him and a caregiver that was willing to trade in a life with a husband for a life with this boy. Sometimes I think we do that as humans. We compensate for the lack of one sort of relationship with attempts to create it in another. and sometimes we succeed and sometimes we don't I guess. you could tell this poor governess, Lalla, was broken hearted when Johnny died. It was as if Johnny were her child and maybe even her family ... and psychologically, perhaps even a husband surrogate. Johnny was her nutrition in life and her medicine so to speak. He fed her with his art and healed her with his spirit. And she could be happy with that.

But what happens when they leave? Thats the sad part of making one's relationship with one's children the principle source of nutrition and healing in one's life. You know that your job is to raise them to LEAVE you. I can feel this approaching with my own sons. I love them dearly but my job is to raise them to leave me (don't make me cry) If I am not careful. If I am depending on them for my "food and medicine" ... I will find myself working at cross-purposes with myself.

Just something for me to really keep in mind as I monitor what is going on in my own heart and head these days. Its really time for me to start consciously preparing them to LEAVE and to put myself in a place where that is not going to affect me in any traumatic way.

Anyway, this is a thanks to my mother ... for her work today ... and every day of my life thus far. I will have to go give her a hug (if she is done with my kitchen. Grin). 

Question for Comment: How important are your relationships with your children to you? How important are you to your parents?

The Songs in Our Head

My friend, L. says that she wakes up with songs in her head that she can't get rid of. In my favorite episode of Battlerstar Galactica, several Cylon sleeper agents wake up with Bob Dylan's song "All Along the Watchtower" in their heads. And Skyler told me yesterday that he just likes people who can just DO what comes into their heads without thinking. So I fugured I would just post the song that I woke up with in my head and see what connection it has to any one who reads my blog's life. Is there a reason we get songs in our heads?

Some people stay far away from the door
If there's a chance of it opening up
They hear a voice in the hall outside
And hope that it just passes by

Some people live with the fear of a touch
And the anger of having been a fool
They will not listen to anyone
So nobody tells them a lie

Billy Joel - An Innocent Man (live in Russia)

Question for Comment: If this was a song in your head right now (and it is) what curcumstances in your life would it apply to? What does it make you think about in your life?

“This journey will be the axle of my life”

Cold Mountain

Charles Frazier

One of my favorite books is Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain. There are not too many books that I would like to read again right now but this is one of them. It is about two people who meet, connect, and are forced by circumstances apart soon after. Inman has to head off to war and Ada is forced to learn to tend for herself. The book is something like a contemporary Odysseus only instead of only focusing on the trials and hardships of the Odysseus character, it also traces the trials and hardships, the internal journey you might say of Ada, who has to be tested and refined as well. It is as if Homer had divided his book up into alternating chapters and told us the ongoing story of Penelope.

“This journey will be the axle of my life” Inman says as he decides to desert the war effort and make his way back to Cold Mountain, the war having broken him in so many ways, he wonders what, if anything, will be left for Ada to love by the time he gets back.

"Maybe you can't see my face, but if you could see my inside, my whatever you want to call it, my spirit, that's the fear I have deeper than any gash on my neck. I think I'm ruined. They kept trying to put me in the ground, but I wasn't ready. But if I had goodness, I lost it. If I had anything tender in me I shot it dead."

I guess what I like about the novel is how life, and the hardness of it, and the challenges of it could not destroy that thing that Inman and Ada loved each other for. And in many ways, their respective hardships peeled away layers of things that were not them and built up elements that were undeveloped before so that they were just as or more in love with each other by the grueling end as they were at the beginning.

Ada: Did you get my letters?
Inman: I got three letters. Carried them in the book you gave me, the Bartram.
Ada: I probably sent 103. Did you write to me?
Inman: Whenever I could. If you never got them I can summarize.
Ada: No, it's --
Inman: I pray you're well. I pray I'm in your thoughts. You are all that keeps me from sliding into some dark place.
Ada: But how did I keep you? We barely knew each other. A few moments --
Inman: A thousand moments! They're like a bag of tiny diamonds glittering in a black heart. Don't matter if they're real or things I made up. The shape of your neck. The way you felt under my hands when I pulled you to me.

How does it happen that people who hardly know each other can love each other? What connects people? What attaches them to one another? What is the sort of glue that causes someone barely met to be so psychically and spiritually necessary to us? "She gave me a book. Ada Monroe." Inman says,

"Man by the name of Bartram. Wrote about his travels. Sometimes just reading the name of a place near home - Sorell Cove, Fire Scale Ridge - enough to break your heart. Thing is, I've been thinking - those places belonged to people before us, to the Indian - What did he call Cold Mountain? How can a name, not even the real name, break your heart? It's her...She's the place I'm heading. And I hardly know her. I hardly know her!"

Thats the question I find so intriguing and would love to sit down and discuss with a group of people who have themselves experienced being pulled into relationships without necessarily knowing why.

"To Inman's surprise, he found himself telling about Ada. He described her character and her person item by item and said the verdict he had come to at the hospital was that he loved her and wished to marry her, though he realized marriage implied some faith in a theoretical future, a projection of paired lines running forward through time, drawing nearer and nearer to one another until they became one line."

Its a long journey for both of the main characters. And you wish the story ended differently, or that whole middle could be cut right out of it but ... that middle is the story where most of us spend so much of our lives. “Needing and getting don’t seem likely to match up any time soon..." for the characters in this book and alas, often in the lives of any of us.

But I still think the best journey's are those that take us to someone we know we love and will be loved by.

Question for Comment: Who is "the place you are heading?" Is it possible that the difficulties you have experienced in life have served to better fit you for that destination?