Climbing the Golden Staircase to Individuation

yes, now, after forty three years I can recognize that under my feet the stairs finally have a golden tint, as I slowly, I mean really slowly, climb up in a spiraling direction, the staircase to individuation. it wasn’t always like this. for a long, long time I thought every step I took was bringing me down, down, down, even though I really, truly wanted to to go up, up. it felt like I was climbing the stairs in an Escher fabricated tower, where the ceiling was the floor and the wall was the ceiling and there was a man sitting at a desk upside down doing paperwork just completely ignoring the laws of gravity with a bowler’s hat and tie that hung over his face like the apple in The Son of Man. was I climbing away from my childhood towards adulthood? was I descending away from adulthood towards childhood? I was always asking myself questions like these, and other questions like, can I become a full, whole, authentic, individual adult if I am unable to completely integrate that little child from whom I ran when I was too young to hang on to youth and too old to value innocence. I have to admit that every question begets more questions than answers that are also questions and now as I am going up the spiral I don’t know if I am weaving the fabric of my spirit or if to really understand the fabric of my spirit I need to loose the threads and unwind the garment that was sewn too tightly together by the nurturing of nature in post-modern nineteen ninety three society. the last thing I will say is this: I now see there is love that is cascading down or up the very center of the spiral staircase and I have now hooked the carabiner of my heart to it in the very case I fall either which way– up or down– and end up back in the future of this little boy who was already drawing caricatures of himself in the midst of Saturday afternoons in Iowa, shoveling green balls of melon in his mouth, before there was any real work to be done, before he even knew their was self-judgement to judge or how orient himself or even knew he had to.