Hence the dark and light now arouse each other.

In my mystics class, the speaker was talking about opening ourselves up to explore the room and each other with our senses, to allow ourselves to perceive things on a deeper, less obvious level. One of us, another student, asked if he meant 'sense' as in the 5 senses, or as in feeling emotions.

"Same thing." he replied.

He talked for a little bit about the possibility that emotions are a behavioral response to what is being sensed, that it is intimately part of the experience of logging information and drawing conclusions from what is being perceived.

That same student had given a small presentation on the life and spiritual development of C. S. Lewis, and one of the quotes she talked about from him had a lot to do with our separation from nature, and our passionate, constant longing to be folded into it, apart, whole again. I think being so heavily conscious is both the token thing that makes us unique in our own minds, and also forces us to feel different, alone. It seems that we have developed keen abilities to intellectualize things, to freeze images, aspects, objects and our emotional reactions to them, to be able to ponder things from a safe, objective distance. So we have become too afraid to be inside of an experience, looking out, to fearlessly step into mental illness, into connection, into love, into our fears, into something potentially painful. We do not nourish the brave parts of self, we quantify and qualify, moralize and demoralize, at a remove that severs us from ever being fully immersed in an experience. Maybe, just like we are taught at a certain point in childhood that we aren't allowed to touch each other, that it becomes an invasion of space, rather than a continuation of exploration, maybe we are taught then that we are separate from nature, that we are some distant, intellectual other, that, like Adam, we must spend our lives naming things rather than tasting them. How do we go past this forced perception? Education systems have developed out of a dogma that pits emotion and reason against each other, and we learn at a very young age that messy non rational emotions are expected to be considered lightly, if not all together ignored, rather than a natural part of ourselves that can be crafted, honed and wielded just as powerfully as our thoughts. We are all partially crippled creatures, and our cut off from the rest of existence is self imposed. We force it on our children. We are ashamed, filled with shame, conquered by it. Catholic, Christian or not, it consumes our existence. Especially the scientists.

We are ashamed of having feelings. Of feeling them.

A lot of the Mystics talk about emotion as how we access the spiritual, or how we tap into nature, each other. Every time that comes up, I wonder about anger, how we all learned growing up in western culture that anger and Satan are one and the same. I have always been hugely ashamed of mine, I ignore it, I walk away and allow safe, controlled bursts for no one to witness my shame and loss of control, I have almost completely eradicated my ability to perceive it. It is a thing unexpressed. When I am filled with it, it immobilizes me, and I am too afraid to be in that black space alone, or that I won't be around people I trust.

But actively ignoring it doesn't mean it goes away. It darkens my past so all I can see are the things I couldn't shout at people who were not kind, or gentle with me when they should have been. When I was tender, when I was fresh. It has left all of my memories twisted with black, with helplessness. I have not learned to wield it with maturity, I hide it like a phantom special needs child that will probably just humiliate me. I am ashamed of it, and as a part of myself, that shame spreads out and attaches itself to other things. If any emotion is a potential to experience the world more deeply, to access the divine, I imagine that cutting off any emotion becomes part of the problem, a kink in the connection, a cut wire, an artfully intellectualized self sabotage against feeling my own feelings and knowing myself.

"...winter in the course of the year, and midnight in the course of the day, are the time of concentration."

Maybe this is where we developed the concept of Ice Queens in our fairy tales, maybe this is why I always felt trapped in semi darkness, maybe this winter was much longer than I realized. Maybe this is why I am so intense, why its almost impossible to find lightness of being. That for how much I want to burn with feeling, I may be actively shunning warmth/light/fire/sun because I am too afraid of what the light would show, that it might be something embarrassing and crippled.

That there are so many different ways to burn.

Distance provides a kind of grammar.

Seated in the audience for a small dance company's showcase I had designed marketing materials for - the performances were all filled with interesting young women, except for one particular piece. A 70 year old woman, the choreographer and company's focal point moved alone, feet shifting in and out of time to delicate sounds. Like a butterfly, like a crone, halting and awkward one moment, powerful and arched the next, making shapes in the space with her body, her sharp movements, her meandering, emotional pauses, she danced as vigorously as a young woman, whatever one's taste for performance, her presence and sharp awareness were nothing to be overlooked, alone on that stage.

I was struck by both her freedom and control over the movements of her body, and thinking back to people in my life, family members, pseudo role models, teachers, adults I encounter all around me - near her age, some not even close who have lost that sense of connection with themselves. It makes me so angry sometimes, that the people I should have been able to look up to when learning what truths composed the world I exist in seem to have willfully relinquished that awareness, of self, and the space around them. That I could find deeper, more meaningful exchanges with individuals perceived through a screen, remote, unrelated to me, than when drowning deep in the clotted embrace of some of my blood relatives. That a simple movement of an aging figure against a white wall could make me want to cry for the grandmother I should have had, for what the human body could be, could have been. For the wisdom I could have drunk off of knowing individuals at the earliest formation of my own sense of self and concept of power.

Like a prayer, like flagellation, like a nightmare, I can only keep fiercely repeating to my friend walking through the cold next to me, to myself in bed that evening:

I never want to be trapped in my own body, by age or fear or disuse.

Oh god, please.

the river tasted me once, spit me back out, so i'm not afraid of her.

The devil? He exists. I've seen him. He lives in the shadows, and fills the holes in our being caused by self doubt. He lived in the words that found me on the playground, whispers from my peers that fell from the lips of their parents, the PTA, who saw we didn't go to church, didn't follow the rules, didn't attend bake sales or fundraisers. Satan worshipers they called us. But he also followed me home at the end of every day, as I trudged as slowly as I could through the thickness of trees in my lush little town, past houses, each one with a different personality to be considered, until the foreboding of turning the corner into my own neighborhood. Often, as I was growing up, I awoke in the middle of the night to the devil standing in my doorway with my light on, watching me as I slept. In the guise of Stepfather, my voice had no meaning, for the devil distracted my mother with lust and laziness, and my fear and words and needs were insignificant to the soul she traded for the ease of darkness, and the wickedness of idleness. As I grew into my voice, and my strength, I would have killed him, beaten his now fragile drug infused bones to a puddle of hate, with no remorse, but it didn't matter how hard I tried to protect my family, the greed and hunger for an easy life was still a flame in the remnants of my mother's soul. She slept with the devil to acquire things without the effort that honest people earned with the hard work of their bodies. She gave away one of her children for an afternoon, traded the innocence of my little brother, as well as her own body for a piece of my Stepfather's inheritance money before it was lost in drug trafficking and prostitutes. The devil drives a peacock blue 350Z and carries a duffel bag full of money.

I did not get a chance to kill him, and he changed his form to fit my evolving insecurities. Donning small, sweet breasts and a sassy upturned nose, he inflicted a pain so close to my heart I mistook it for the fire of being in love, and I lost myself in the urgency of feeling that ransacked my body for three years, the scar tissue building up so fast it obscured everything important in my life. 'Worthless', she screamed at me, so many times those three horrible, lost years, I had that word for breakfast everyday, I drank it from her lips when we fucked in the shadows and I believed it. Nothing fans the flames of abuse like honest intentions. My goodness and trust were the knives she used to flay me open to the spine like the center attraction at a pig roast, skin charred, and the devil invited everyone to grab a plastic fork and cheap off-brand barbeque sauce to sample the texture and flavor of my beauty and innocence and moral integrity.

I thought I had put some distance between me and the devil, but I glimpsed him the other day, lurking in the eyes of my coworkers in the shop, in the poisonous words that have suddenly poured slick and stinging from the one person who had my back, whom I shared my triumphs and accumulating dreams with, as well as my fears and insecurities. It doesn't matter what I do, good or bad, if I have to defend myself from verbal abuse, or I fight for someone to get a raise, or take on responsibilities I won't get paid for, simply because it needs to be done, the guys in the shop will whisper over the table at the lunches I have been ostracized from about how all of those things merely prove that I am the reason seasonal workers have been let go in the past, that I am the reason people who don't work get addressed by the bosses for not working, that raises are withheld as well as handed out because of me, that failed crops and plagues are dictated by my whims, that anything I receive: respect, accolades, raises, authority are born solely from the whiteness of my skin, rather than my competence  rather than my own strength and ability. And I watch smart, capable people choose ignorance over growth, to spit the devil's rime rather than recognize the truth and beauty of the people around them. It doesn't matter if I have no awareness of things that are happening that I get blamed for, but they are still my fault, and every gesture I make with good and honest intentions gets twisted by these people I use to love, into cruel, evil shadows of themselves. The only way to protect myself is to become a ghost again, when I have been trying so hard to become real.

All of these occurances feed off of the depth of my insecurities, my need for validation, my earnest desire to see people treated fairly and getting what they deserve, good intentions and open, honest conversations, and the more of myself I give away, in love or in fear, the more I fan the flames of hellfire that scorch the souls of my feet and stumble on my path. I am a different person than I was three days ago. I can no longer blame my childhood for the setbacks and confusion of my adult self, or use it as an excuse for my lack of awareness of the darkness that waits in the shadows of every action of my physical being, of every word that falls unguarded from my mouth to be twisted and misunderstood and used against me. I am solely responsible for what I give away of myself, and what I allow to dog me. Self doubt and insecurity are the doorways that open to the devil, and the only way to escape is to eradicate all self doubts and insecurity. The only way to survive, is to wholly, without question, trust your instincts, trust your intuition, and ignore your fears. YOU HAVE TO TRUST YOURSELF COMPLETELY AND WITHOUT QUESTION. Yourself and no one else.

Then the devil will be blind.