Occupied by Living Your Own Myth

It is astonishing how one can become peculiarly occupied by living his own myth that the meaning he assigns to men, women, and events begins, almost without notice, to lose its divinity and simply return to ordinary living.

What once appeared to me and was assigned beautiful meaning and clever words for years is now almost completely overtaken by my own work, my own life, and my own becoming.

I did not consciously strip these things of their meaning. I did not decide they were no longer sacred. I merely became occupied elsewhere. And it seems that when one becomes sufficiently occupied by his own life, he no longer has the same need to lend so much of himself to what stands outside him.

It first revealed itself to me in relationships, through the feminine. For years I had carried an image of her that seemed larger than the woman herself, as though some part of my soul had quietly assigned her a kingdom and then forgotten who built it. Yet these past days I became so absorbed in my own work, my own body, my own symbols, my own strange development, that I nearly forgot her.

I had already encountered this problem on June 25, 2026, when I wrote, “When I met the Goddess in the heaps of summer”:

It appeared to me that I was trying to fit the image of the feminine too perfectly, after only a few days, I barely knew the feminine yet the stakes felt cosmic, big enough to make me make silly decisions that took me to the king’s desert. That gap, between how little I know her and how much she's stirring, that's the projection. It was never that big about her. It couldn't have been. There wasn't enough of her there yet to be that big.

The intoxication was partly my own paint. The glow I saw was at least partly a light I was shining onto her. That's a small grief, because it means the magic wasn't entirely hers to give.

The freeing half, if the glory is mine, then it is mine. That radiance I hung on her face is my own my own depth, my own underworld, my own peculiarly beautiful sea, my own cosmos, my own capacity and incapacity for beauty and feeling, my own inner feminine. She was carrying something that actually belongs to me. And the moment I take it back off her, she becomes ordinary flesh with moods and flaws, as simple as the forest and birds in the outer world.