Episode 308 - Phosphorus

About this Episode

There's a terrific Sherlock Holmes movie from 1944 entitled The Scarlet Claw. Well, it's actually not that terrific, but the premise is great.

In the movie a criminal disguises himself as a kind of glow-in-the-dark swamp creature out on the moors, who murders unfortunate travelers and terrorizes the village.

Come to find out, the murderer is putting phosphorus on his hands, his feet and his face in order to frighten everyone, and Sherlock Holmes figures it out. Our detective ends up finding his man by following the phosphorus.

The analogy is to our personal histories. If you want to find out the truth about yourself, follow the phosphorus! And the phosphorus can be found wherever and whenever your true inward heart-self came out -- whether in a relationship or a moment of stress or an incident of rejection, you name it. To understand yourself, follow the phosphorus to the places in your past where it stuck. And as I tried to say in Podcast 307, the phosphorus may well have stuck on a song.

I listen to "Please Come to Boston" (1974), for example, by Dave Loggins, and I'm right there in our first year of marriage, in a foreign country, no car, no frig, no stove, no money. Just a little hope, faith, and charity.
And I cry. For being moved and touched by that period, I cry.

You may have something like that. All it takes to capture your entire emotional attention is to hear a song from a vulnerable time in your life, and you're right there again! It's phosphorus.

It is also true that by means of the phosphorus you can become the main, lamed character in your own case of arrested development. That's no good. It is why uncompleted mourning of a loss can paralyze you for... well, almost... forever. Somehow, to live, you have to get off of square one.

At the end of the cast, I offer a kind of blinder to the deceptive glow of your phosphorus. It's worked for me, and it can work with you. Think R. A. I. N. ... "Summer Rain", Johnny Rivers, 1968.
LUV U!