Afternoon @CherryBomb CB,
I started to write this last night, but ended up falling asleep sitting at my keyboard and waking up more than an hour later with a molto stiff neck. Uggh.
So I'm trying again today. As I said to Anne, sometimes I drift into a non-verbal space and it takes a real effort (or, increasingly often, too much of an effort) to write anything. (I don't think it's dissociation as such, since I don't feel detached from the world or activities around me, just from structured language.) It may appear that I'm disregarding or uninterested in replying or not valuing what was said to me, but that's not the case. I hope you'll understand.
As always, your post was wise and perceptive. Thank you for being willing to accommodate my boundaries -- I do struggle a little to think of them like that, because I find it hard to imagine anyone a bit self-aware who wouldn't have that boundary, but I'm taking the points you've made on-board. There is one thing I'm struggling with, an option you didn't included: I've had a string of people in my life who told me "home truths" not for my benefit but for their own. (It becomes very clear when people are more attached to being right than to being friends.) Maybe you haven't had those experiences, or maybe you're just better-natured than I am, but they're corrosive, and nowadays I find it very difficult to trust or give the benefit of the doubt up-front. That's a boundary too. And also a limitation. [Wistfulness. Regret.]
So: you asked about my Moonwatcher moments. (Moonwatcher is the name of the proto-human in my avatar.) One of such moments I spoke about in my reply to Anne ( @PeppiPatty ), and that was my discovery of myotonia. A label can be limiting, but it can also be a freedom, because for me the shame of physical and social incompetence dropped away, and I started to realise that if others couldn't understand it was *their* shortcoming, not mine. Another one was seeing 2001, which spoke to me like nothing before and inspired me with a sense of purpose -- I set my sights on being a cosmologist, living and working on the Moon by the time I was forty, and that took me as far as studying physics and maths at university ... until Reagan strip-mined the human spirit and sold NASA off to commercial and military hucksters. My resolve crumbled, and I lost my sense of purpose.
I went to the US, and actually scored an interview at NASA, and even a favourable (but limited) response to the question of employment. But ... yeah: "the current climate." No foreseeable foreign hirings for at least ten years, and even then not in a purely scientific field. NASA didn't do science anymore; it did funded experiments for capital commerce and organised militarism.
Disillusionment doesn't begin to describe it -- invalidation may be closer, and certainly loss of reason and intent -- so I did what humans have done for thousands of years: I went to the desert. I tracked down someone who could teach me to do a Vision Quest (a Lakota woman who became my friend), and went to Arizona. And had another Moonwatcher experience (in fact, literally) on the edge of the Grand Canyon.
This one night during the Quest I was sitting on a bluff, right on the edge of the canyon (I could never manage it these days, because as I've gotten older I seem to have developed an incredible fear of high, open spaces like cliffs and lookouts, but back then I seemed okay) with the drop right there at my toes and this yawning open chasm beckoning in front of me. The desert night sky was truly awesome -- I remember feeling almost lifted into it -- and then ... the Moon. This massive, gobsmacking pumpkin yellow moon sailed over the horizon at me, such a tangible presence I could almost feel its weight, like it was jostling me for access to the sky. It was around three-quarters full, but the shadowed part wasn't dark -- it was a bluey-grey, lit by Earthlight, so you could still see its features ... and suddenly it was one of those moments when you get this joltingly clear sense of geometry and distance, of the Moon as a solid body floating in space, and by extension the Earth that way as well, and the Sun somewhere below the horizon, hidden from my sight and yet making this geometry visible and possible, and I was part of it and yet apart, a being hanging in space and infinitesimal compared to these massive bodies that yet were themselves tiny against the backdrop of all the worlds out there that I could see but not discern, the same geometries in infinite iterations ... and with a gush I suddenly encompassed them all just in realising they existed and were in my sight even though I couldn't see them, and still here I was sitting on the edge of the greatest chasm I had ever encountered and compared to it I was unimaginably small, and pointless, and ...
In a sense, I've never recovered. Or perhaps reverted is the word. I feel I carry that infinitely large / unimaginably small impossible-yet-undeniable dchotomy inside me all the time. Perhaps it's what we really are. And I do wonder if that's what often moves me into silence.
Woof. Now I'm ... distracted. Before I go from this post, I will say: thanks for your interest, CB. I do get a sense of value and support from the conversation, in addition to the comradeship, so I'm very grateful. If I haven't asked personal questions in return, it's really 'coz I don't know what's okay. Remember that word, "boundaries" ? 😉
Slàn leibh,
Aonaran.
