The Velveteen Rabbit, written by Margery Williams, is about a stuffed rabbit who is neglected, then loved and then discarded by the unavoidable pains of life. And just before the rabbit is to be burned and destroyed, he is instead made real because he has been loved.

The velveteen rabbit remained hopeful, a dreamer and sensitive to life.

Even though the rabbit was so well loved that he had holes, patches and a button to replace his missing eye, the wearing out was from being thoroughly loved. And when it comes to intimate relationships, the trials, tribulations and shadow side of love have the most powerful opportunities to alter who a person is.

When a heart is broken, one can permanently shatter like Humpty Dumpty, or become soft and more real, altered and not broken.

The irony of a intimate love is that the person who was once so beautiful and attractive becomes a source of pain. Yet only when we are cheated on, abandoned, taken advantage of, abused, betrayed, judged, blamed and neglected do we have the opportunity to become real, to see the full scope of life and the entire depth of love.

Ideally, the person we are with will treat us with love, but in reality most of us are still seeking and discovering what love is. People who do not know love, will not act or be loving, to others or themselves.

Every loving relationship has the full scope of life.

How people respond to painful events reveals their qualities of soul. And only when we are hurt is there the potential to deepen the sensitivities and understanding of the people we love—our own self included. It is rare for a person who loves us to be deliberate in causing pain. Normally, the people who we love and hurt us do so because they are dwelling in a personal hell and cause harm unintentionally.

Often times, the pain people inflict on the ones closest to them is the exact pain they inflict on themselves internally, at the deepest levels.

People communicate who they are, from where they are at.

There is a silly ideal in quasi-new age culture that enlightenment is some state of always being happy and content, a bubble of upwelling bliss that giggles at every instance and takes nothing personally. Fortunately, bliss-bubbles burst, reality always sets in. And the deeper truths of who and what we are, and what love is, present themselves. The incomplete surface level ideals of love can mature only in the presence of pain because then we understand compassion, forgiveness, tenderness and have respect for all that life has to offer.

Many religions preach love and most people claim love, but do we really take time to understand Love ?

The bible (yes i know some of you are switching off as i mention the bible…)has a wonderful list of loving traits. Love is patient, kind, does not envy nor boast and is not proud. Love does not dishonor others, nor seek gain for oneself. Love is patient, not easily angered and keeps no record of wrongs. Love rejoices with truth. Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres.

When we become a velveteen lover, we become real.

Just as the velveteen rabbit became real from being worn thin and discarded because of love, we also know what love is once we discover and embody loving traits. More than knowledge, love transcends thought and feeling and gives a state of understanding of oneself, others, and the world. Love gives us the ability to be real, to work with the emotional cycles of day and night and to see past superficial skin to the eternal beauty within.

Love allows us to be alive, and to endure, and be stronger for being worn thin.

Love makes us real.

The Rising:

Ian McCallum

One day
your soul will call to you
with a holy rage.
“Rise up!” it will say …
Stand up inside your own skin.
Unmask your unlived life …
feast on your animal heart.
Unfasten your fist …
let loose the medicine
in your own hand.
Show me the lines …
I will show you the spoor
of the ancestors.
Show me the creases …
I will show you
the way to water.
Show me the folds …
I will show you the furrows
for your healing.
“Look!” it will say …
the line of life has four paths –
one with a mirror
one with a mask,
one with a fist,
one with a heart.
One day,
your soul will call to you
with a holy rage.

“Earworms”, some people call them. Songs that get stuck in your head and go round and round, sometimes for days, sometimes for months. For no apparent reason you cannot help yourself from humming or singing a tune by Coldplay or Pink, or horror upon horrors, the latest Idols reject, or my particular favorite, Sunlight detergent commercials.

To a psychologist – or at least to this psychologist – the most interesting thing about earworms is that they show a part of our mind that is clearly outside of our control. Earworms arrive without permission and refuse to leave when we tell them to. They are parasites, living in a part of our minds that rehearses sounds.

We all get these musical memories, and people appear to have different ones, according to a team at Goldsmiths University in London, who collected a database of over 5,000 earworms. True, the songs that we get stuck with tend to be simple and repetitive, but it seems we are not all singing the same number one song at the same time.

Lost in music

Neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote in his book Musicophilia that earworms are a clear sign of “the overwhelming, and at times, helpless, sensitivity of our brains to music”. Music is defined by repetition, just like earworms, and this might make earworms so hard to shake – they are musical memories that loop, say a particular verse or a hook, forever repeating rather than running to completion. Some people report that singing an earworm to the end can help get rid of it (others report in frustration that this does not work at all).

As well as containing repetition, music is also unusual among the things we regularly encounter for being so similar each time we hear it. Fences are visually repetitive, for example, but each time you see the same fence you will look at it from a different angle, or in different light. Put a song on your stereo and the sound comes out virtually identical each time. Remembering is powerfully affected by repetition, so maybe the similarity of music engraves deep grooves in our mind. Grooves in which earworms can thrive.

Another fact about earworms is that they often seem to have something interesting or usual about them. Although they will often be simple and repetitive bits of music, tunes that become earworms have a little twist or peculiarity, something that makes them “catchy”, and perhaps this is a clue as to why they can take hold in our memory system. If there was nothing unique about them they would be swamped by all the other memories that sound similar too.

If you have got a particularly persistent earworm you can suffer an attack of it merely by someone mentioning the tune, without having to hear it. This proves that earworms are a phenomenon of long-term memory, rather than merely being a temporary “after-image” in sound.

But this is not the whole story. Human memory researchers have identified so called “slave systems” in our short-term memory, components of the mind which capture sights and sounds, keeping them alive for a short time while we focus on them.

One slave system is the “mind’s eye”, capturing visual information, another is the “inner ear”, the part we use for remembering phone numbers, for instance. It is this second part that seems to get infected with earworms. Rather than rehearse our plans for the day, idle thoughts, or lists of things to remember, the inner ear gets stuck on a few short bars of music or a couple of phrases from a song. A part of us that we normally do not have to think about, that should just do what we ask, has been turned against us, tormenting us with a jukebox request that we never asked for.

That our minds are not a unity is one of the basic insights of modern psychology – it is the story Dr Freud was telling, and, although it differs on many of the details, modern cognitive neuroscience says a similar thing. The sense of our selves is not the only thing going on in our minds, psychology says. The mind is an inner world which we do not have complete knowledge of, or control over.

Fortunately psychology can provide some vital intelligence on how to deal with an unruly mind. Consider the famous “don’t think of a white bear” problem, which as it implies involves trying not to think about white bears. Try this yourself, or you can set it as a challenge for a loved one you would like to torment. This problem is a paradox: by trying not to think of a thing you constantly have to be checking if you are still thinking of it – re-invoking precisely the thing you are trying not to think of.

The general solution for the white bear problem is to do something else, to avoid both thinking of the white bear and not thinking of the white bear. For earworms, the solution may be the same. Our inner ear, a vital part of our cognitive machinery for remembering and rehearsing sounds, has become infected with an earworm. This is a part of ourselves which is not under our control, so just sending in instructions to “shut up” is unlikely to be of much help (and has been shown to make it worse). It may be better to employ the inner ear in another task, preferably something incompatible with rehearsing the earworm.

If earworms survive because of their peculiarity, the hook that makes them catch, then my prediction for ridding yourself of an earworm is to sing songs that are similar. If your mind is poisoned by Brittany Spears’ Toxic, for instance, then try singing Kylie Minogue’s appropriately titled Can’t Get You Out Of My Head. By my theory this will erode the uniqueness of the memory habitat that lets the earworm survive. Let me know if it works!

Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living, it was with this in mind that I took a magnifying glass and scalpel to my self this year, in an effort to explore and understand why parts of my very soul had grown stale. I delved into my projections, regressions, ego identifications, my complexes, my shadow and finally my ego’s Quisling readiness to be deceived, to believe what makes it comfortable to believe. It was harrowing work, alchemy, so much burnt away, sometimes I thought I was going to have a classic “nervous breakdown” and then, just as the night was darkest, I stumbled upon my self.

I found what Thoreau had stumbled across many years earlier, “…an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive more savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild no less than the good” Walden.

I observe how many of us lead lives of quiet desperation, how we can improve our homes without necessarily improving those who live within them. I refuse to live that life.

Things may be set in motion by forces greater than ourselves, but the choices are ours. The sum of those choices and their consequences which may ripple through generations to come, is the story of our lives.

Finding our story, the examination of how it has played out and the recognition of possibly another story which seeks to emerge through us is the evolution towards an examined life.

It takes courage and fortitude to encounter and interrogate the story that has sometimes grown over our true selves as we busy ourselves doing things we think are important. To cut through our numbness, the expectations of others, our fear, this takes awareness which always threatens to flee when the way is sharp and jagged. Stay on the path towards living in alignment with your true self. Nothing else will ever matter as much as this.

At times, dealing with the powerful visisitudes of life without the support of a loving, reflective father figure has been daunting. The pressure of having to make pivotal decisions without the benefit of knowledgeable, wizened counsel has lead me to develop a powerful internal locus of control which I can trust to make balanced decisions (most of the time). The problem emerges when things go wrong. It is at these times that I recognize just how difficult it is for me to seek out and trust support from other men.

I miss the idea of having a father I never had.

As I’ve grown up and become comfortable with my self, I’ve learned to overcome the big issues I had with him, but I point out the scarcity of affection in my relationship with him because I think it partially explains why male approval was always such a distant, yearned for quality for me growing up, why I still have a soft spot for male affection and why I sometimes find myself seeking the respect of older men.

One of the pernicious consequences of living in a country still struggling with homophobia, social verticality and patriarchy, is not just the rigid gender roles this system imposes on men (and obviously women), but also the way it prevents grown men from expressing love, gratitude and affection to each other (and often to their sons). Because of this, many boys grow up seeing affection as inherently unmasculine because their fathers never modeled affection and unconditional love as a constituent part of their own masculinity.
One of the major systemic tragedies for boys is the ongoing poverty of male affection in their lives. Boys grow up seeing affection as sexual behavior and not social behavior.
Just as tragic, our system still punishes boys for expressing love and affection to each other (except in the case of sports) by subjecting them to social and sexual taboo, which means boys will grow up seeing affection as (hetero)sexual behavior and not social behavior, which is troubling. For many straight boys, affection will become gendered, the unique behavior of girlfriends, moms and female friends. While girls are victims of the system just as much as boys are, the system victimizes them in different ways at different stages (through shaming, income inequality, domestic relegation, sexual objectification and ownership, for example). But one of the major systemic tragedies for boys is the ongoing poverty of male affection in their lives.

As psychoanalytically unsatisfying as it is, for many grown men, there is a void inside us that was earmarked for our fathers’ attention and approval (which can often feel like signifiers of love). It’s a void we carry with us into adulthood, a void that only disappears (if it disappears at all) with friendships that are deeply communicative, supportive and unconditional. This void only disappears (if it disappears at all) with a lifetime of self-forgiveness for the emptiness we feel inside. This emptiness is not our fault, but if we deny its existence or pretend we’ve moved beyond the scene of our childhood trauma, we become victims of our own pathology, innocent bystanders in the crossfire of denial, unlovability and self-reproach.

Men only heal when we surround ourselves with others who are engines of deep and uncontrollable love, people who are compassionate, affectionate, forgiving and open with their emotions. For me, the most recent source of affection, kindness and love has been my children. In high school, it was my English teachers. At University it was my lovers and friends. Today, my own fatherhood gives me new emotional space for repairing the tiny broken parts of me and for expressing my endless devotion, explicit love and continuous affection for my children.

One of the strange elements of life is that girls become women simply by growing up and physically maturing (for the most part), but boys must earn manhood. We do not become men simply by growing into an adult body, we are forced to repress or deny natural parts of ourselves (emotions, compassion, vulnerability, and so on), and to adopt the four basic rules of manhood (via Michael Kimmel):
1. Don’t be a sissy: You can never do anything that even remotely hints of the feminine. In South Africa we don’t raise boys to become men, we raise them to not become women.

2. Always win: Wealth, power, status—these are the markers of masculinity. “He who has the most toys when he dies wins.”

3. Be a sturdy oak: What makes a man is that he is reliable in a crisis. And what makes him reliable is how closely he resembles an inanimate object. A rock, a pillar, a species of tree.

4. Go for it: Exude an aura of daring and aggression. Live life on the edge, Take risks. Don’t give a damn about what others think.
Then there are also two ways we define manhood – (1) not feminine, (2) not gay.

All of these “rules” for growing into manhood force into false roles – we are much more than these simplistic limiting rules. When we adopt these rules to fit in and be considered men, we lose large parts of ourselves – and this leaves up wounded and hurting.

But we do not have to live this way – we can begin to wake up to the ways we have been forced into these little boxes of manhood. We can undo the wounding and become more expansive and whole. But it requires we do some work – hard work – to uncover our pain, to find our lost emotions and reintegrate them.

Someplace inside of us – not matter how cliche this sounds – there is that child who holds all of the feelings and desires and hopes we have denied we have (in our effort to be seen as men). We can access that child with help from a therapist, a coach, or with some personal growth technologies.

We can reparent that child with love and compassion, give him permission to have his feelings, to dream big dreams, to follow his natural curiosity. In doing so, we heal ourselves as adults. It’s not an easy process – it requires more strength and courage than most men possess. But the rewards for doing so are tremendous.

With the wisdom of an adult, we can be the loving parent or guardian we needed as a child.
Events from childhood, our first experiences, have the power to shape our lives. Some do so immediately, offering us challenges to overcome and encouragement to make use of our talents and interests. In the process character is built, and we make the first steps upon our personal paths. Other events seem to lay dormant until adulthood, when our closest relationships help to bring out the deepest aspects of ourselves. This is when unexamined lessons can be put to use and untended childhood wounds make themselves known in a call for healing.

We may discover issues of trust coming up, or perhaps we find ourselves mirroring actions from our past instinctively. No matter the case, we have the power within us to heal ourselves at the deepest level. With the wisdom of an adult, we can be the loving parent or guardian we needed as a child. Knowing that we are each whole spiritual beings having a human experience, we can nurture ourselves from that wholeness, and then reach out to others as well. We can recreate scenarios in our mind’s eye, trying different outcomes and following them to their logical conclusions. In doing so, we may be able to imagine possible reasons a situation occurred as it did, and even accept that it could not have happened any other way. With the wisdom born from age and experience, we might be able to see events from a different perspective, bringing new understanding and freeing ourselves from any hold the past may have on us.

Life offers opportunities to clear these weeds in the gardens of our souls. However, when we want to focus on easier and more pleasant tasks, we are likely to pass up the chances, leaving the wounds to continue to drain our energy and resources for living life fully today. We might find we need support to face the events of the past, so turning to a trained professional who can offer tools for healing can be a valid choice. As long as we remember that the child we were lives on within us, we are always free to go back and right old wrongs, correct mistaken perceptions, heal wounds, forgive, and begin anew.

I need to go walkabout. The pull is gaining momentum daily. It is no longer a decision to be made. I know that it will happen soon for my Soul demands it. I have started looking at adventures that will fit the particular tone I seek. I don’t want to just walk, I want to drop into a space within by using an external experience.

The article below articulates how I am trying to calibrate the journey. It is written by American adventurer and artist Daniel Fox, enjoy.

It happens every time, and independently if I want it or not, I find myself pulled into it.

Parked at Big Sur , I am getting my equipment ready. The plan is to hike to Syke Camp, spend a couple of nights there then one night on the beach and finally hike a 3,000 feet peak nearby. I should be excited, thrilled and relaxed, but instead I am anxious and worried. I try to focus on making sure that I don’t forget anything—I would really hate finding out that I have forgotten a lens or battery for the camera after a five hour hike and having to return. Despite all my previous stories written, despite all the photos that I have taken, despite the fact that deep down I know that it always works out, I can’t stop but stress about the uncertainty on if I will be able to find something to write about or find a nice landscape to photograph. Will I be inspired? If so, about what? Will the light be good? Will I see animals? Will the weather cooperate? And what if I don’t have anything to show by the end of the week? My last story,TIME, was written many months ago in Hawaii. I have since been twice in Alaska, kayaking and hiking a glacier, and even though both were incredible expeditions, I failed to come back with new words.

Knowing the reasons why the page has remained blank doesn’t help either. The creative process is one of the hardest things to find. And even more challenging is to protect that process as the world around you changes. Inspiration is complicated and some are more famous for their bizarre rituals then for their own art. I love being on expedition—having a set target, a destination to reach, a goal, but it is not what I live and work for. The content that I produce during these adventures is more descriptive—narrating the days, the progression, the ups and downs, the struggles encountered and the magical moments witnessed. It is premeditated. Inspiration is not really the most important aspect, but rather your ability to deliver the story, to capture the local flavors.

What I long for as an artist is much different. It is when I have the feeling, the sensation that the inspiration has come to me rather than me seeking it. It is that sense of being connected to something else, something bigger. As alone as one can be when creating, knowing that you are only a channel through which your environment expresses itself brings a total different perspective—the loneliness disappears and a deep fulfilling connectedness lives – bringing along a sense of purpose.

I am two hours into the hike and my mind is still stuck in that parking lot. I am walking the trail much like I would walk the sidewalks of New York—focused on the destination and shutting myself to everything else in between—a self defense mechanism we have had to developed to protect ourselves from the constant and relentless assault on our senses from our modern lifestyle.

Instead of enjoying the moment, I feel heavy and distracted. Layers of anxiety rooting from our civilized, moral and intellectual culture weighing on me. My ears are open but don’t hear anything. My eyes are open but can’t see anything. My body is tensed, preoccupied with every uphill steps I have to make. The Ventana Wilderness is full of wonders with majestic Redwoods and beautiful Pacific Madrones, yet, my head looks down—I am a man walking his purgatory!

After five hours, I arrive at the destination tired but wired. Where are the hot springs, where to camp? Quick lets get to work—what can I photograph? I can’t rest. This is work and I must produce! It is six pm—the tent is up, the backpack emptied, the hot springs have been located and already “enjoyed.” The kettle is on the stove. I am camping on this tiny “island” in the middle of the Big Sur River, a magical set up, yet I am totally oblivious to my surroundings. I am pacing frantically. The steam shoots out from the kettle and I am slow to realize the water is ready. So much for someone who is supposed to be “one” with nature—pathetic!

I take my cup of mate tea and sit on a log that rests slightly above the river, bridging my campsite to the north shore. My feet hang with my toes dipping in the frigid running water. I take a sip. Then I take a deep breath. Another sip— another breath. Finally, the moment I have been unconsciously waiting for is starting to manifest itself. Like the afternoon wind pushing away the morning fog, with every new sip and every new breath, my comatose state starts fading. Free of their societal constraints, my senses awaken from their lethargy. My back arches up. My chest opens up. My ears start tingling to the sound of water swirling around the rocks. My eyes start seeing for the first time an American Dipper just a few feet away, diving for a few second then reappearing with a nymph in its beak. My lungs are beginning to feel lighter. My mind is clear. My heartbeat has slowed down, yet I remain extremely sharp. By the time my tea is finished, everything feels new and fresh—alive. In reality though, it is me who has changed, it is me who is alive now. I was closed and sequestered, now I am freed and attuned. I have finally found the state of mind I came here for. And with it came my inspiration. Thought by thought, sentence by sentence, words have come back. Stripped from the confinement of technology and cultural expectations, I was finally at peace with simply one thing—being. “Nature is pleased with simplicity.” ~ Isaac Newton
“Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing.” ~ Oscar Wilde
As much as we want to categorize, compartmentalize, judge, humanize, and beautify nature, for me the “wild” is only one thing—real. Everything is what it is. There are no right or wrong, no bad or good, no judgement. Nothing is pretty, nothing is ugly. A dead tree has as much value as a living one. A fire will benefit some while it will kill others. The prey does everything it can to survive, as does the predator. There are no winners, no losers. No one is more important, yet everyone is connected and interdependent. Nothing is perfect—evolution is this endless chaotic yet harmonious dance where each adjust to the other, over long long long periods of time. Species adapt or disappear. Continents break while others sink. Still, every morning, the sun rises and brings with it life. And even if this sun stops to shine, another one, somewhere else in this huge universe will illuminate another world.

Independently if we believe and speak about it as a separate entity, in reality we are no different than nature. Quite the opposite, we are nature, and we are intricately part of it. We are nothing more than a footnote in the grand scheme of evolution. Yet we have come to believe that everything revolves around us—that is everything is about us. Our view of the world is no different then when we thought that the earth was the center of the galaxy. Instead now we see ourselves as the center of Life, of the Universe. In our quest to conquer—not only territorially, but intellectually and morally, we have lost our connection to the world around us, to the planet and to life. We also have lost our ability to look at our environment (the surroundings or conditions in which a person, animal, or plant lives or operates) and learn from it. We no longer look at nature and use it to understand life—instead we see nature and life as flawed systems that need to be corrected and reengineered under our own perception of what it should be. We see ourselves as great saviors with god powers! Our myopia and shortsightedness have made us inefficient and incapable of looking at the bigger picture. We focus on details, obsessing about single events, while loosing perspective of everything else around. Our expertise at extracting data from pretty much anything—important or not, trivial or useless, has transformed our world into an intellectual dump. Buried under so much information and incapable of managing it, we look at technology as our only hope. Completely lost and feeling powerless, we blindly put our salvation into machines and their ability to “process”—because the only way we can make sense of anything is through numbers, equations, statistics and graphs. Common sense is no longer valued unless it can be measured and quantified. Sitting on that log, with my empty cup of tea, nothing feels out of place.

I don’t feel out of place. The humility brought by the simplicity I find myself surrounded by is relaxing, refreshing and gives me hope. Real and honest is what nature is to me. It is a constant reminder of the true essence of what life is about. It is my source of inspiration, my elixir for meditation and my most profound teacher. “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” ~ Marcel Proust This article has been adapted from the original.