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Joanna's avatar

I loved your post this morning, thank you.

I can also relate to it.

At age 16 I won a scholarship to study with the Boston Ballet and later became an apprentice with the company. I was not a competitive person however at the cost of my desire for love, community and friendship, so the path proved a destructive one for me.

But I continued on...

Eventually in order to cope with living a life of complete contraction in values I became addicted to drugs and alcohol and all but destroyed myself in the years that followed. It wasn’t until I completely surrendered my life to God that my healing and real self emerged from the ashes, and I moved to a remote area in Maine.

The irony is the house we bought happened to be next door to a dancer with a healthy mind and a beautiful soul and we started a dance company based on love, sharing and community values and so I picked up from there...later I converted to orthodox and today I pray and practice visual art, also an interest of mine, in my rural home “away from the fray” as much as is possible.

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Eric's avatar

Thank you for this post, Jack. Appreciated

I resonate with your point about the lack of elders. I wonder if it is not tied up with the increasingly horizontal associations our generation were corralled into. Gen this that and the other, rather than intergenerationally, tied up in no small regard I am sure with the loss of real work which required human wisdom to learn, i.e. from our elders. Whilst I am appreciative of GIrard's insights, mimetic desire perhaps has a richer, perhaps more spiritually formative aspect within generational heierarchies. To emulate one had to grow 'up'. But now, what do 'elders' have which is thought desirable?

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