This is quite personal yet I think significant enough to share, maybe about how we are all so much formed through our experiences of others in our original environments, important impressions we may not need to ever outgrow.
As I came near the end of my usual hot-bath time I spontaneously added more hot water with my big toe. (This must have hinted that I was not yet ready to leave. Unconsciously there was more in store.)
Soon, above me, as if, in the air were clear images of the upper torsos and faces of my six older brothers. It struck me just how strongly their presences have been and remain valued by me. Significantly, it was not any particular words, admonitions, or ideals that mean so much but more something like their auras, their personal unique essences beyond any words.
Being from twenty to seven years older than me, so of no conscious typical brotherly-competition, I was free to adore each one in their very unique impressions. So in this vision-like moment words would have been very out of place.
As I left home at eighteen years, except for the oldest, my brothers remained in our NW Alabama hometown or nearby. My brothers cast no conscious shadows toward me but each was for me a unique and warm light in life. It was real but also in a sense surreal.
Once I left home, my experience of them may be describable as a strong 'participation mystique'. Their impressions were always close by me in a strong adoring attachment that was significantly unconscious, dream-like and so, in a sense, not of this world.
When I was in much psychological distress in 1985 and unable to move forward, four of them drove to Houston and physically rescued me. Unless that displayed their shadow aspect, which it did to me at the moment, it was in fact a grand unspeakable display of brotherly love.
In this vision-like moment their essences were captured for me as a gift; personally and as a team, each one essential, shoulder-to-shoulder: Rufus, Lester, George, Ike, Gene and Barry. This was not primarily unconscious childhood nostalgia or typical 'participation mystique' but an objective evaluation and appreciation, of how it was, experiencing each of them in my mortal life.
The two other persons, long passed, who live in me similarly as these six brothers, and who so much, primarily wordlessly, participated in my early human formation and identity, are my mother and father, Rufus and Anne Lester Hibbett, 'mamma' and 'daddy'.
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