John: In my dream, I am walking toward a field where women are playing softball. I suddenly get the idea I want to be the pitcher. I do not necessarily want to bat or play in the infield or anything; I don’t care about that. The game can just continue and I will do the pitching. I am still approaching the field, and when I make the suggestion the ball is thrown to me as if they are taking me up on the offer.
I’m not completely on the field and yet I can feel the game, and before I even get to the pitcher’s mound I take the ball and I pitch it to the batter as if I can’t wait. But the pitch doesn’t even reach the plate – it bounces and then rolls to the plate. I am shocked that that could happen. I feel that I should have no trouble pitching that distance .
It is to the point where I carry such a strong sense about it all. I can visualize the pitch. The pitch goes where I want it to in my mind. I can feel the effect. I can visualize the batter swinging and missing over and over again, or hitting the ball where it is caught or they are thrown out. This is what happens in terms of how I feel it. But now that I am on the mound, I cannot get the pitch to go where I want. I can feel it on the inner, but then in the reality I am out of balance; the ball is going all over the place. It is all I can do to just get it to go across the plate and, when it does, it gets hit. It’s embarrassing.
I know I can do it but I am not doing it, and I see everything that I pitch getting smashed around. Here I came in with all this confidence that brought a certain degree of enthusiasm to the team, and now I am an atrocity. It’s not helping either side. How can the game go on when the pitching is like this? The scene reaches a low point when a guy comes to bat (somehow it is a man, when at first it was all women playing).
He is the typical type that I knew in high school who centers everything around himself, and tends to block out other things that are happening. He can show a sense of openness, but it is still all about him. So he is the complement to my nature, and he comes to the plate. And all he can think is that there is no way that he’s not going to crush the ball. He’s the exact opposite of me. He sees that, he knows that.
In other words, I could see myself pitching with perfect ease and knowing where everything is going, how everyone is going to swing. I can see them missing or popping the ball up. Everything had a certain flow to it that I could visualize. From this batter’s perspective, all he can visualize is how he can hit anything he wants to hit. So it’s like the flip-side projection to my visualization.
To make matters worse, I am watching the worst possible performance come out of me. I am connected to what I see inside with a heartfelt knowingness, but the manifestation into the outer is just not happening. The connection is not there. My energetic imbalance in terms of what occurs in the outer is shattered because what I know inside and can feel and what is occurring in the outside are so opposite each other that it creates this quality that is a barrier between the two points of the lower self and the higher self.
This is how the masculine does it: trying to sort something like this by a strength of conviction, when the feminine just knows in terms of the overall that she should be able with no problem to both scan and sort simultaneously (see Getting Sorted). It’s a forgone conclusion to her; she just knows that it has to work that way. The masculine is inclined to see it as two functions, and try to logically figure out how to make both happen. The feminine knows that life is meant to happen from a perspective of wholeness.
The epitome of my despair is when I pitch a ball that slips out of my hand. It hits the ground about three feet in front of me and rolls up to the plate and the batter hits it anyway, right off the ground. He hits the ball but it’s an infield hit; it doesn’t reach the outfield. I probably pick it up and throw to first base, but he has already run past first base; he does not stop running. It gets thrown to second base too late, then to third, and the next thing I know he has run all the way home and scored on a ball that was a roller on the ground.
Even my worst pitch is hittable. The fact that the batter was able to turn that pitch into a home run demoralizes me even further; I cannot do anything right. I am seeing my inner confidence obliterated.
