Thursday, August 8, 2004

 Thursday, August 8, 2004

      I started listening to The Confessions of St. Augustine on Audible. It’s billed as a book that is relevant for contemporary readers.  I got several surprises. In the introduction to the book, the author gives some biographical information. Augustine has a reputation for being a wild child, who wantonly indulged his passions.  Come to find out, he did not go out carousing nightly for long and hook up with anyone available.  Besides lusting for sexual contact, his greatest sin was stealing pears for the pleasure of the defiant act as a young adolescent. At seventeen, he took a concubine, a common law wife’ by today’s standards, and lived with her faithfully for fifteen years. They had to break up so Augustine could achieve higher social status. According to the introduction, both were heartbroken. Why didn’t he marry her? She wasn’t in his class. His mother, St. Monica, arranged a socially appropriate marriage partner for him, a 10-year-old girl, for her 25 to 27-year-old son.  He needed that match for his social advancement. He couldn’t marry this poor girl immediately because Roman law dictated a girl had to be 12 to get married. He never did marry that child. 

    Augustine confesses to having sexual desire. Rational thought was highly valued in those days. Any impulses generated by ‘animal’ needs were considered base and in contradiction to God’s will.    I’m surprised they didn’t give up eating bread and drinking water; we share those base needs with the animals.  While our current culture may be too invested in sensual pleasures, the people of Augustine’s time and place were more puritanical than the Puritans.

   In my session with Shelly,  I described myself as slippery to work with. She guffawed. I guess she sees me that way.  I would imagine most people at my point of development would quit therapy.  I stick with it till all dissatisfaction is resolved, either by acceptance or change.  Fortunately or unfortunately, I have experienced and believe in a change where most people don’t. I remain endlessly hopeful. Again, the problem is my doggedness is more often rewarded than not. My eye for possible change applies to external circumstances and internal states of mind. 

    My criteria is some internal state of satisfaction. That dogged pursuit of peaceful reconciliation with my mother paid off big time. She lived with me for the last 18 years of her life. It was a profoundly satisfying experience. While I complained bitterly about what she did to me when I was a child, I wasn’t nearly as disturbed by the problems we had when I was an adult. I loved having her live with us. It was good for Mike, too. He was in complete support of the arrangement. We all lucked out. It remains one of the most satisfying experiences of my life.  Was it perfect? Absolutely not! But it was truly good enough. I don’t know when I learned to trust my internal measure of enough, but I trust it completely, possibly too much. 

   My relationship with Mike was also good enough. What a joy to have loved someone enough to have found their foibles adorably amusing. He was my funny Valentine.  I miss loving and being loved. I was so lucky with both my mom and Mike.

     Casey finally came by to do some work on the yard. He generally cancels five or six appointments before getting here to do the job.  Today, he arrived with a friend, Joseph, who just moved to Hawaii recently. My best guess is Joseph is the better worker of the two. I’m glad to have him on board. Joseph took on the Bismarck Palm nuts. He brought down most of them.  Some were out of his reach. While they worked at the top of the driveway,  I went down and filled in two more buckets of green waste from the Plumbago shrub, loaded the trash barrel with those buckets and whatever fallen palm fronds I could find, and wheeled it over to Darby.