Here there is really no alternative but for each of us one by one by one to make an attempt to think through these divisive issues to the best of our abilities…and then to take that existential leap to a point of view. I’m just more ambivalent than most because I have thought myself into believing that, in the end, there does not appear to be a way for me to get around feeling as fractured and fragmented as I am. On the other hand, I know full well how difficult it is to convey this to others. And I always assume that I may well be wrong. I can only go into places like this and explore it with others.
For me this always goes back to the profound mystery embedded in existence itself. Human existence in particular because, as far as I know, it is the only existence “out there” actually able to imagine a spiritual realm. What that means, however, is, again, so profoundly intertwined in the personal experiences of each of us – apart from and among others – we can only “go in” so far in exchanging our at times very different understanding of it. Or, rather, so it seems to me.
Okay, so here is the part where I ask you if you might be willing to take me into the last moot you attended or the next moot you will attend. To give me an idea of what is discussed and what activities unfold. At least insofar as it is not too “secretive”. I’m always most curious about how people come to belong to groups like this and how the group members deal with issues in which there may not be a consensus. Obviously many people go from the cradle to the grave and never come into contact with a pagan community. Then for any number of reasons they do. That is always what fascinates me the most about any set of beliefs. Not the beliefs themselves so much as how, in being able to believe in something, it allows one to anchor their sense of self to something that is so much bigger than they can ever hope to attain as just one person in a sea of humanity. Also, the part where the different groups have similar or different beliefs and you have to examine them and decide why to belong to one rather than another.
The communities I was once a part of myself but am now no longer able to be. Though, over the years, not for lack of trying.
Are there other blind members in the moots that you attend? Does being blind ever come to the surface in your interactions there?
This is something that I could never even begin to grasp other than as someone who is able to grasp it from a frame of mind rooted in my own understanding of these things. But my own understanding of them can never be more than my own subjective collection of stereotypes and prejudices. Again, if this allows others to anchor themselves to a “larger meaning” in their interactions with others then [for me] it always comes down to tolerance and “do no harm”.
Haunting. I had never heard this song. I just included it on my music thread. But easily one of the most hauntingly beautiful songs I have ever heard is this one:
youtu.be/Pq2cFmhyfoI
youtu.be/pzolVZofcRM
I have begun to read a new novel. It’s called Blindness by Jose Saramago.
How to describe it!
It’s a sort of science fiction tale. People in a particular community begin to go blind “out of the blue”. But instead of black they see white. An “opaque milky white”. And in becoming blind they become contagious. So it is necessary for the authorities to quarantine them in, it turns out, an abandoned mental institution. One of the characters, however, is able to see but no one but her blind husband [who is an ophthalmologist!] knows it. I’ve only just begun it and given that I read 3 or 4 books at a time, only read a dozen pages or so a day.
Here is a passage from it:
“Like most people, he had often played as a child at pretending to be blind, and, after keeping his eyes closed for five minutes, he had reached the conclusion that blindness, undoubtedly a terrible affliction, might still be relatively bearable if the unfortunate victim had retained sufficient memory, not just of colours, but also of forms and planes, surfaces and shapes, assuming of course that one was not born blind. He had even reached the point of thinking that the darkness in which the blind live was nothing other than simply the absence of light, and that what we call blindness was something that simply covered the appearance of beings and things, leaving them intact behind their black veil. Now, on the contrary, here he was plunged into a whiteness so luminous, so total that it swallowed up rather than absorbed, not just the colours, but the very things and beings, thus making them twice as invisible.”