The Woman in America.

There is a woman in America who is putting me through a mangle and hanging me out to dry. No, this isn’t a tale of romantic angst lifted from the pages of a teeny bopper magazine. This is big. I mean, if you think the Empire State Building is big, it doesn’t hold a candle to this (apologies to D Adams.)

This is about being forced to look back on my very earliest memories and being aware of certain convictions, apparently already entrenched before I was old enough to reason effectively or learn from cultural conditioning. It’s about tracing the development of my attitude to those convictions, first finding vindication for them through religion. It’s about how I subsequently rejected that religion and began to question them; how I moved into a period of conforming to the secular mores of the time in which the convictions were tolerated but not encouraged; how I progressed beyond conventional culture and embraced a more Bohemian mindset in which such convictions were not even tolerated; how I entered a phase of spiritual exploration and followed a tradition in which they were considered of no import one way or the other; about how I broke free of reliance on any single spiritual tradition and almost forgot my convictions altogether; and about how I set myself adrift from my native culture, began to seek the nature of who I am without external influences, and found that I’d come full circle: the convictions were as strong, if not stronger, than ever.

And now my head is swimming because it seems I stand alone. I see no one else who shares my convictions, and the search for my personal Grail looks doomed to failure because all I see is inadequacy and the prospect of perpetual disappointment. I see my convictions mocked and denigrated wherever I look.

This is about the relationship between body and spirit. It's about what I perceive to be the sacred nature of the masculine:feminine connection, and how I can no longer tolerate the slightest adulterating influence on that connection. It’s about how it makes me sick to my stomach when I see the constant assault on it being mounted in the modern world. It’s driving me up the wall. It even has me wondering whether I’m simply a fruitcake.

And my awareness of all this has been provoked by a woman in America. So who is she, really?