Monday, November 29, 2004
Light = Sanity
I wrote this before I found India’s file. I wanted to post his file first. I’ll be posting my response later today.
Just for the record, this post puts us only about 1,500 words from completing the 50,000 needed to be a nanowrimo winner. nanowrimo ends tomorrow. I have a feeling we’ll be going over the limit.
We’re thinking about keeping up the blog, at least for a while. If anyone out there is reading this and getting anything positive from it we’d be more inclined to keep it up. Let us know.
Sometimes the only thing that saves our sanity is light. Our love affair with light started when we were very young. Lillie and el and I can just sit and watch clouds and cloud shadows too, the way they race across fields and slide over the mountains.
Sunsets and sunrises fascinate us too. We have prisms hung in all our windows to invite the light inside. Sunrise plays rainbows all around our bedroom. We’ll drive 20 miles to watch the sun set from the highest mountain around. You can see nine mountain ranges from there.
Light is part of the rhythm of our life. It’s always on the edge of our awareness until it becomes so intense it demands full attention.
The other people who seem to grasp our fascination are artists and photographers. But for them it’s an applied science. For us it’s more.
We count the day’s passage through the slant of light on a stand of aspen trees. We see afternoon in the glint on our pond. It’s our anchor. We breathe it. We measure season and time of day by the intensity and slant of light. We see spring coming through subtle changes in thin winter sunlight long before first blossoms. Summer dawn is slow and sultry through a full array of leaves.
A camera captures reality, not what our heart sees. We replay inside mid-day, sunsets, and storms of fragile duration and exceptional beauty. Inside the light is always exceptional. Inside we always walk in beauty.
When we were hospitalized a decade ago el and I would sit cross-legged on the wide windowsills looking out. We watched the world go by. We lost ourselves in the play of light on distant mountains, birds on the wing. We meditated.
Sometimes we simply went inside. We took the light with us as we’d learned to in childhood. Sometimes we sat like that for hours.
Once when we did there was a psychiatrist and a nurse standing in our doorway when we stretched and jumped down from the sill.
“What were you doing?” the doctor asked.
It was dark outside. We’d been on the windowsill for at least a couple of hours.
“Meditating,” I said.
“How do you do that? I’ve always wanted to learn,” he said.
I shrugged. “You just focus down until it feels right.” I figured he wouldn’t get it if I told him to take the light inside. And I didn’t want to explain the difference between our inside world and the meditative experience. Sometimes it’s pretty subtle.
Owl says writers and artists who are multiple and have their own inner worlds like we do have it easier than those who don’t. He’s right. We have a rich inner construct to play in, to draw on for images and characters.
One of the first novels I wrote stemmed from a vision we’d had in childhood. It was an easy step from that into the realm of sci-fi. I even named the hero after myself. It was a classic Q in-joke.
When we read we hear characters speak, we see their world as if we were watching a movie. When we were younger the books we loved the most stayed with us. We could ‘read’ them inside over and over, seeing every page as we turned it. We kept them in el’s library. When bad things were happening outside we could retreat to the center of our world and read. We could pull information from those pages to use outside.
Sometimes I can still do it. I pull a book off a shelf in el’s library find the page with what I want to know. Or if someone else is reading they can share a book with others. It helped us get through school. Back then we could pull a textbook off the shelf or our notes from a class and see them, page by page, word for word. We could call up an image of something a teacher had written on the blackboard weeks earlier. It got us through a lot of exams. It’s not as easy to do now. Sometimes I think we’ve just grown rusty at it because we don’t do it as often.
Another little trick I had was staring at teachers during tests. If I focused on the teacher the answers were there. I just knew them. It freaked out one of our history teachers in high school. I sat in the front row and focused on him during every test. He was sure I was cheating in some way because I got hundreds on every pop quiz and test for a whole semester. He watched me so closely he nabbed me switching with el.
“Are you ambidextrous?” he asked.
“Ambiwho?” I was sweating. I knew the word and I knew what it meant. He’d seen me writing with my left hand then as el took ops he passed the pen to his right hand.
Sometimes I wonder if other multiples do these sorts of things. We met a few over the years online. But most were pretty needy when we met them. They wanted to talk about how their teenage alters acted out and how did other people handle that? Please. Help.
I long to find other multiples who are functioning and productive. Support groups are all well and good, except we find ourselves cast in a supportive role more often than not. It’s not that we don’t want to help. But we’re not therapists.
We are good listeners though. We elicit confidences all the time. We care about people and they know it. We believe everyone has a story to tell, and every story is important.
That belief carried us far as reporters. It gave us the tenacity needed to interview octogenarians who were nearly blind and deaf, learning what the world was like when they were young, how things had changed so very much but was still the same. People lived and laughed and loved when the only transportation was horse-drawn.
Sometimes the elder I was interviewing would grow quiet and we’d sit there watching the light change, time passing in companionable silence.
If I waited long enough they’d start talking again. Sometimes they talked all afternoon before they were done. These old, old people were happy someone wanted to hear their stories. They didn’t care that I was writing for the Sunday edition, or that thousands of people would read my words. They only cared that I listened.
It’s what we all want, someone to listen. Listening is caring. Caring expresses love. If no one listens you feel abandoned. I once had a therapist tell me I had abandonment issues.
“But I was never abandoned,” I argued. I thought abandonment meant leaving a baby on a doorstep or something. I was amazed to learn neglect and abuse is a form of abandonment.
I know it consciously just like I know I have trust issues. If there is a Q who doesn’t they haven’t come in from hiding yet. On some level I know whatever affects one of us affects all of us.
No Q came through childhood unscathed. On the other hand we are who we are because of what happened. I don’t always like what’s going on in our life, but I do like being who we are. I know you English teachers out there are shaking your heads at the word who in the previous sentence. My grammar checker says the right word is ‘whom’. But it doesn’t sound right. It sounds alien. So I’ll stick with what’s familiar. After all this is our story.
Oprah are you still listening? I thought so. Good. Now, do you see the way the light is illuminating the top of the mountain? Doesn’t that lift your heart?
© 2004 M. S. Eliot
Just for the record, this post puts us only about 1,500 words from completing the 50,000 needed to be a nanowrimo winner. nanowrimo ends tomorrow. I have a feeling we’ll be going over the limit.
We’re thinking about keeping up the blog, at least for a while. If anyone out there is reading this and getting anything positive from it we’d be more inclined to keep it up. Let us know.
Sometimes the only thing that saves our sanity is light. Our love affair with light started when we were very young. Lillie and el and I can just sit and watch clouds and cloud shadows too, the way they race across fields and slide over the mountains.
Sunsets and sunrises fascinate us too. We have prisms hung in all our windows to invite the light inside. Sunrise plays rainbows all around our bedroom. We’ll drive 20 miles to watch the sun set from the highest mountain around. You can see nine mountain ranges from there.
Light is part of the rhythm of our life. It’s always on the edge of our awareness until it becomes so intense it demands full attention.
The other people who seem to grasp our fascination are artists and photographers. But for them it’s an applied science. For us it’s more.
We count the day’s passage through the slant of light on a stand of aspen trees. We see afternoon in the glint on our pond. It’s our anchor. We breathe it. We measure season and time of day by the intensity and slant of light. We see spring coming through subtle changes in thin winter sunlight long before first blossoms. Summer dawn is slow and sultry through a full array of leaves.
A camera captures reality, not what our heart sees. We replay inside mid-day, sunsets, and storms of fragile duration and exceptional beauty. Inside the light is always exceptional. Inside we always walk in beauty.
When we were hospitalized a decade ago el and I would sit cross-legged on the wide windowsills looking out. We watched the world go by. We lost ourselves in the play of light on distant mountains, birds on the wing. We meditated.
Sometimes we simply went inside. We took the light with us as we’d learned to in childhood. Sometimes we sat like that for hours.
Once when we did there was a psychiatrist and a nurse standing in our doorway when we stretched and jumped down from the sill.
“What were you doing?” the doctor asked.
It was dark outside. We’d been on the windowsill for at least a couple of hours.
“Meditating,” I said.
“How do you do that? I’ve always wanted to learn,” he said.
I shrugged. “You just focus down until it feels right.” I figured he wouldn’t get it if I told him to take the light inside. And I didn’t want to explain the difference between our inside world and the meditative experience. Sometimes it’s pretty subtle.
Owl says writers and artists who are multiple and have their own inner worlds like we do have it easier than those who don’t. He’s right. We have a rich inner construct to play in, to draw on for images and characters.
One of the first novels I wrote stemmed from a vision we’d had in childhood. It was an easy step from that into the realm of sci-fi. I even named the hero after myself. It was a classic Q in-joke.
When we read we hear characters speak, we see their world as if we were watching a movie. When we were younger the books we loved the most stayed with us. We could ‘read’ them inside over and over, seeing every page as we turned it. We kept them in el’s library. When bad things were happening outside we could retreat to the center of our world and read. We could pull information from those pages to use outside.
Sometimes I can still do it. I pull a book off a shelf in el’s library find the page with what I want to know. Or if someone else is reading they can share a book with others. It helped us get through school. Back then we could pull a textbook off the shelf or our notes from a class and see them, page by page, word for word. We could call up an image of something a teacher had written on the blackboard weeks earlier. It got us through a lot of exams. It’s not as easy to do now. Sometimes I think we’ve just grown rusty at it because we don’t do it as often.
Another little trick I had was staring at teachers during tests. If I focused on the teacher the answers were there. I just knew them. It freaked out one of our history teachers in high school. I sat in the front row and focused on him during every test. He was sure I was cheating in some way because I got hundreds on every pop quiz and test for a whole semester. He watched me so closely he nabbed me switching with el.
“Are you ambidextrous?” he asked.
“Ambiwho?” I was sweating. I knew the word and I knew what it meant. He’d seen me writing with my left hand then as el took ops he passed the pen to his right hand.
Sometimes I wonder if other multiples do these sorts of things. We met a few over the years online. But most were pretty needy when we met them. They wanted to talk about how their teenage alters acted out and how did other people handle that? Please. Help.
I long to find other multiples who are functioning and productive. Support groups are all well and good, except we find ourselves cast in a supportive role more often than not. It’s not that we don’t want to help. But we’re not therapists.
We are good listeners though. We elicit confidences all the time. We care about people and they know it. We believe everyone has a story to tell, and every story is important.
That belief carried us far as reporters. It gave us the tenacity needed to interview octogenarians who were nearly blind and deaf, learning what the world was like when they were young, how things had changed so very much but was still the same. People lived and laughed and loved when the only transportation was horse-drawn.
Sometimes the elder I was interviewing would grow quiet and we’d sit there watching the light change, time passing in companionable silence.
If I waited long enough they’d start talking again. Sometimes they talked all afternoon before they were done. These old, old people were happy someone wanted to hear their stories. They didn’t care that I was writing for the Sunday edition, or that thousands of people would read my words. They only cared that I listened.
It’s what we all want, someone to listen. Listening is caring. Caring expresses love. If no one listens you feel abandoned. I once had a therapist tell me I had abandonment issues.
“But I was never abandoned,” I argued. I thought abandonment meant leaving a baby on a doorstep or something. I was amazed to learn neglect and abuse is a form of abandonment.
I know it consciously just like I know I have trust issues. If there is a Q who doesn’t they haven’t come in from hiding yet. On some level I know whatever affects one of us affects all of us.
No Q came through childhood unscathed. On the other hand we are who we are because of what happened. I don’t always like what’s going on in our life, but I do like being who we are. I know you English teachers out there are shaking your heads at the word who in the previous sentence. My grammar checker says the right word is ‘whom’. But it doesn’t sound right. It sounds alien. So I’ll stick with what’s familiar. After all this is our story.
Oprah are you still listening? I thought so. Good. Now, do you see the way the light is illuminating the top of the mountain? Doesn’t that lift your heart?
© 2004 M. S. Eliot
