Untitled (K. Howe)

Funny. My therapist seems fond of saying to me, "You often want to explain how it works." She thinks that I want to explain away the feeling, I think. It might stop me from feeling the feeling, I think she thinks, this inclination of mine toward abstraction.

I want to explain how it works ("it") because I feel like this will help me feel the feeling. I like having a map. If I know I am halfway up the mountain because it says so on the map, and I can tell how big the mountain is, and what lies to the left if I turn that way, and what lies straight up if I keep on persisting, then I am much more likely to say, "my what a gorgeously treacherous mountain this is!" The mountain becomes a tourist destination. Like a roller coaster at an amusement park. Magic Mountain.

I resist these packaged emotions in the culture at large, of course. How trite, I think. Why not experience life, I say. Those people are missing the sublime. I wag my mental finger at them.

And yet, when I find myself caught out on the exposed ragged face of my mountain inside, with thunder and lightening clapping all around, my appreciation for the sublime is no more useful than the soggy, disintegrated scraps of my attempted maps.

We talked about it again recently - why she evades my desire to draw neat maps of my internal wilderness. "Its mainly because you always ask at the end of session," she said.