in the dark
Ξ February 6th, 2008 | → | ∇ Culture, General, Philosophy |
I have sensitive eyes. As a result I prefer to spend my time in places with less light. The excessively bright lights at work cause me consistent eye strain, and even with my brightness turned down, black-text on white coming from an LCD is painful to me. Wearing my glasses helps a little, because the lenses are anti-glare. Or something like that.
I was just thinking about the dark. Right now I’m sitting in my bedroom in the relative dark. There is a little bit of ambient light coming through the windows. I should call it light pollution. It’s mostly light from street-lamps and stores. There is a tiny bit of light filtering in from the living room through the open door. The clock is digital, so there is that as well. I have the brightness on the laptop turned almost all the way down. The background is a dark picture (link), one of my current favorites.
My room is spacious for a Chicago apartment. Probably 9′ x 10′ or so. Add the bay windows and there’s more space. I have a lot of floor space, and the hard-wood floors are kept as clean as I can. (Sometimes that’s not very clean at all.) All along the windows are shelves that I built a couple weeks ago. Pine, unfinished. Altar space and storage space. Places for me to focus myself.
I turned out the lamp on the floor next to my bed. (My bed is on the floor.) I wanted it to be darker in here, because it is easier on my eyes. Also, it suits my mood much better. Even when I’m in a good mood I dislike strong light. I’m not in a particularly bad mood right now, but I’m definitely in a dark mood.
I’ve been thinking about where I’m going in life. What I’m trying to do. I’m weeks away from completing my three year journey through the Mystery School. Weeks away from becoming a mentor of the Inner Order. And I look at my life and wonder how I got here. There is so much in my life that I didn’t plan, so much that just happened. Most of it is great. Some of it is not so great.
I never would have thought that at 27 I’d have had less bed partners than my 20 year old room mate. Okay, so I’m a little down about not having someone to share a bed with. What can I say, I’m horny. There’s more though. I never intended to make a family. It just happened. I don’t regret it, and I wouldn’t give it up for the world, but I didn’t really choose to make it. Reazling that most of the good things in my life are the result of Kismet, circumstance, or coincidence, makes me question the value of planning.
No matter the plans I make, things seem to take a course very different. And I rarely mind the course change. Would I have gotten to the same place without the frustration of struggling with my plans? Maybe that’s why it bothers me so much that Shivian has to have everything planned out to the last minute, and gets so frustrated when it doesn’t happen. All the good things in my life are the product of waiting for opportunities to arise, and taking them. And I realize that I’ve been trying to nurture and explain that pattern, but don’t have any better words yet. There is a part of me that fears Shivian is missing out on the best of life, because he isn’t willing to look outside his calendar.
Not really my place, but I do worry a little. But it’s dark where I am, and I don’t rely on the light to tell me what’s going on. I often wonder if that is all that distinguishes people like me from cowans. I look around, and I let myself be informed by so much more than just what I see, or fail to see. I don’t know how to explain it.
I’ve read how other people have said it, and I don’t think it’s right. I’ve seen detailed descriptions of how a sensitive correlates sensory information and reaches the conclusions they do. People write things that go a little like this.
“The sensitive is open to information from a wider variety of sources than the mundane. She perceives with her eyes the subtle inflections of body posture and skin response, and interprets these on an intuitive level. When combined with sensitivity to vocal modulation, physical scents, and the impressions received from her sixth, psychic, sense, she is able to make an intuitive leap of understanding that a mundane would not be able to reach.”
Mundanes. It’s kind of an ugly word, a little offensive I think. I suppose some people might consider cowan offensive too. (It is the traditional term to refer to someone not a part of the craft.) I tend to use it to refer to someone who doesn’t practice magic, or has little psychic or intuitive awareness. Everyone is psychic, but so many of us have shut it off and kept it shut for so long that we wouldn’t know where to begin waking it back up. But back to point, I was thinking about the differences between me and so many of the people I interact with. Is it just that I like the dark? Is that really what it comes down to?
Who really knows. Perhaps there is no difference, and my discernment has broken down. Perhaps I’ve lost it. My experiences are what they are though, and it would be follow to try to live outside of them. That is perhaps the true definition of insanity. To deny that ones experiences are valid, and thus attempt to exclude a piece of our being. Whatever, it’s late and I’m tired.
