Tiny Bubbles

That’s sort of what the inner mind looks like right now: Bubbles swirling around, rising and bursting.  It’s constant movement, so unless one is Right On It, lotsa those brilliant bubbles just float…away…and one is left with the awareness that there was, yes! really!, a flash of understanding, a moment’s repose, and then….uh…….huh?

But at the moment,  the concept we’re getting the Intensive on is perception.  We see what we expect to see.  So, when we’ve misplaced something for example, it can take a long time to find it because we, perhaps unconsciously, keep looking at where we expect it to be instead of clearing our mind’s eye and scanning the whole area impartially.  Of course Attitude influences Perception.  So, on that last lengthy trip down the rabbit hole I couldn’t get right side up for a while because my attitude was…on a par with a squashed Dixie cup.    I do feel that the Stuff that’s Going On right now is affecting how everyone on earth feels, whether they know it consciously or not.  So many things are staring us all in the face at present we just can’t see it all.   And that can make it seem as though there are no options, not just for whatever we’re trying to figure out, but at all.  That, of course, does not help at all.

So, when my kind Gentle Reader mentioned that…well, basically tags have a purpose….it was a tiny bubble moment.  Because what I saw was that, essentially, tags are a way of describing something, in a specific sort of shorthand way.  The way *I* look at thing like tags is as a broad philosophical sweep that doesn’t include enough concrete definition.  To oversimplify.  And? This is an ongoing feature of my challenging engagement with The World.  Who knew?  So that was a really good piece of information and now? Now I get to learn how to do something new.  Analyze things in a totally different way.  I’d come to the conclusion, while sitting in a small and wonderful German cafe in Berkeley waiting for my mechanic, that I’d raked over the coals so much they all had parts in their hair and I was no closer to either question or answer than ever.  This meant that once again I had brilliantly replicated Einstein’s definition of insanity.  Something I’m really good at, as it happens.  So the idea of looking at things in a piece by piece way instead of an amorphous all overish way…well, it’s different.    I managed to pull myself together, mop my eyes, snag my notebook and write down the salient points, just as a start.  There was a bit of a distraction- or perhaps a clue- provided by two women sitting next to me eating lunch.  They were discussing how so very  many people they knew were out of work and desperate, needing to be “taken in” (in one case), and how they (the two women) weren’t going to do that.  “Something will happen” they said.  “He/She/They will be all right.”  And so they kind of tagged all that as managed.  Not their problem.

Seeing as how I felt some not small similarity to the Unemployed Individuals, and nothing in the following interactions of the afternoon  made me feel much better about Things as They Are, and I had actually starting writing some defining words down in that cafe (OMG, I thought.  Now I’m one of those people sitting at a cafe table writing! Holy Cats!), when I got home to the Tag Comment, it was like a big light went on.    My teacher used to say that true listening is healing.  And we all need a witness.  It’s just that sometimes that witness has to perform a describing function to complete the circle, as it were.  Things now are on a knife edge, and clarity is fundamental to the navigation of that edge.  I drove back up north, through the gathering dusk, purple clouds and rolling brown hills (now we’re in a drought, usually they’d be green) feeling all of us hurtling through space toward whatever destination there may be.  We may, and probably do, tell ourselves that “something will happen” implying a dramatic rescue, but I think we’re at a point now where Tags are, really, not just our friends but important ones.  We have to start calling things by their proper names.  Otherwise we won’t be able to see the whole picture.

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