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I either just do or I don't. Time will show whether it is effective or not.

Even suffering has its proper and needful place as "everyone else is busy, but I alone am aimless and depressed. I am different. I am nourished by the great mother."[10] Empty, I am filled. Sorrowing, I am comforted. I touch my pain deeply and am flooded with healing in return. "Be really whole, and all things will come to you."[11]

My writing provides me justification and direction. Even if I know not what I intend to do with it, as Nietzsche would say, "Poetry does not lie outside the world as a fantastic impossibility begotten of the poet's brain; it seeks to be the exact opposite, an unvarnished expression of truth"[12]. It is my therapy, as is most of my lifestyle. My writing, like my body work, is another devotion or yoga, another part of the path;

"The pathological discharge, the catharsis of Aristotle, of which philologists are not sure whether it should be included among medical or moral phenomena, recalls a remarkable notion of Goethe's. Without a lively pathological interest," he says, "I, too, have never yet succeeded in elaborating a tragic situation of any kind, and hence I have rather avoided than sought it. Can it perhaps have been yet another merit of the ancients that the deepest pathos was with them merely aesthetic play, while with us the truth of nature must cooperate in order to produce such a work? "[13]

True art can not be created from a formula; it must instead come from the deepest of suffering, a communal sharing of pain, "... the artistic development of the individual..., through an ecstatic reality which once again takes no account of the individual and may even destroy him, or else redeem him through a mystical experience of the collective. In relation to these immediate creative conditions of nature every artist must appear as "imitator," either as the Apollinian dream artist or the Dionysian ecstatic artist, or, finally... as dream and ecstatic artist in one. We might picture to ourselves how the last of these, in a state of Dionysian intoxication and mystical self-abrogation, wandering apart from the reveling throng, sinks upon the ground, and how there is then revealed to him his own conditioncomplete oneness with the essence of the universe"[14]

Here Nietzsche begins to emphasize balance, as does the Tao. I need to retain or reincorporate a certain amount of Apollonian principles to maintain right living, if I may playfully sneak a Buddhist term into

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