“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The same applied to Ruburt. You chose challenges, then, because despite it all your personalities are the kind that set up such life situations to begin with. Your abilities would meet some conflict in terms of religious, sexual, and social beliefs. This conflict would in a certain fashion sharpen the issues. To meet with these, Ruburt for example adopted certain beliefs that at various times would be helpful.

You react by setting up defenses. Because of Ruburt’s old ideas about femininity, kept beyond their time, he feels more vulnerable than you amid those unsafe conditions, and has put up extra safeguards. Life was not meant to be perfect. You can, however, choose to accept your challenges wholeheartedly, resolutely—something that you have not really done. I do not think you believe what I tell you, and you do not believe me because you do not really believe that the point of power is in the present.

You could have stayed in apartments all your life, denying yourself the privacy that you now enjoy, and thus avoided any conflict. You chose to grow, to experiment, and to face whatever issues were involved. For you, the artist was not connected with any ideas of homemaking, though outside of that context you wanted to own your own piece of land, however small. Around you, you found, were men who had traveled other roads—your neighbors, and you felt yourselves to be aliens. You put yourselves in the middle, simply speaking, of the conventional world that earlier it seemed you had sworn to combat or ignore. This was quite necessary, for you were in danger of thinking of conventional people as symbols only—not as individuals with their own problems and concerns.

Your lives, like everyone’s, have rhythms. Ruburt’s creative life follows rhythms in which he produces excellent works usually in great bursts of activity—then a quiet period. You work in more measured patterns, and this is largely responsible for your individual and joint feelings over “Unknown” Reality.

The idea of a workroom, so-called—and I prefer studio—is a good one; excellent. You found yourselves surrounded, however, by men whose life-style is completely alien to your own. This added conflict for both of you.