In my life I have had things that over periods of years and even decades have continually changed and evolved in my mind and in so doing reflected back to me things that I needed to know at that point in time. It's as if something speaks through them, using words and symbols that have always been present in such a way that different phrases or actions or events suddenly take on new levels of meaning. When it works, it's uncanny. Simultaneously creepy and reassuring in the way of all bedrock spiritual truths that suddenly reveal themselves.

When I was a teenager it was the Styx song "Come Sail Away." I'm not joking. At various random times in my life that song would come on the radio and a line or a verse would suddenly resonate to some situation in my life with an eerie relevance.

Nowadays, it's Star Wars.

I just got through watching Episode 5 (The Empire Strikes Back for you uninformed heathens). I was watching the first parts and laughing and making jokes at the screen and (worse) thinking "Why didn't they have homing beacons in their radios?" and "Why didn't Han immediately call for pick-up when he found Luke or at least tell them he'd found him?" and stuff like that. Completely forgetting that this is myth, not reality. This quit for the most part when Yoda came on the scene but I wondered -- and sorrowed -- that I no longer seem capable of feeling any wonder, or of seeing anything as symbolic. I'm always so cynical now. I don't daydream anymore.

Yoda complains that Luke is too focused on the future and the horizon and never has his mind on what he's doing, but in my case that's the entire problem. I've eliminated all imagination from my life.

But I must be capable of something because I still don't see a little green latex Muppet. All I see is the Jedi Master.

So I was sitting there watching and wondering (for the hundredth time, it seems) how do I get myself out of this because I know that's part of what's killing my writing. I don't know how to get out of it.

Yoda covered that too.

"You must unlearn what you have learned."

So I need to figure out what it is I've learned in my life that has left me like this, and figure out how to fix it. I've got to somehow figure out how to restore my faith in a lot of different things.

I've always thought of my whole life as a test of the Force. Maybe the whole notion of being in confrontation with it is wrong.

Maybe despite consistent appearances a lot of what I assume about the world is wrong.