photo: nico by tawa for his “digression: beauty”
I look through the lens of my own constructs to see you through the lens of yours. Like two projectors aimed facing one another. I illuminate you by the light of my individual story. You can imagine, as we shine our Sight on one another the images combine to create a relationship – each combination unique. Which then creates very real conditions of experience.
These things we are born to – let’s look:
How do I interact w race?
Is race the color of my skin? Is race affected by the place I was born? Is race the family from which I come?
How do I interact w orientation?
Is orientation who I am sexually attracted to? Is orientation lived sexual experience? Is orientation hormonal response?
How do I interact w gender?
Is gender influenced by my sexual organ? Is gender identification and traits? Is gender how I sense my sex?
How do I interact with difference?
Is difference measured by an IQ test or societal behavior? Is difference determined by physical ability? Is difference a result of chromosomal behavior?
If yes, then:
There is no separation.
If I am with another who knows the same, then there is no separation.
If I am with those who see difference in the sameness of existence, then…
I get ssweaty. I am flustered. I do not understand. I feel memories of hate speech and teachings that could not absorb me. I am repelled and sometimes rebel against my compassion. I get huffy… I look at people with disgust. I even yell at strangers and people I love while pointing my finger in their face. It is good to know truth and to fight for it. But know why you are fighting and what is truth. If I am disgusted at lack of love for another life, then I am disgusted with myself at my lack of love for that stranger spitting racial slurs in the street that I directed to ‘shut the fuck up’.
How are we relating to these constructs and how else can we? They are there, regardless of whether or not they make sense to me. Separatist notions of race, orientation, gender, ability.
We are not different. And we are.
We live seen as others see us, as we see ourselves.
I like to remember, that just like everything else made of life, we flourish in certain circumstances that nurture our organic-ivity. Fanning embers of love and oneness is a truth. This truth exists while seeing difference in one another. All the while knowing we will not understand someone else completely and that doesn’t seem to be the point. It seems the point is to look around, to take the time to see one another as we walk, to notice the difference between an image and the projector it beams from, and to help when we are called.
If we share the time and space of life, then, I guess it is for me to notice how I am interacting with the construct of “words“ and notice the interaction that we have with our individualized and communal constructs. And the emanation of this behavior to effect and be affected by our relational view of the world in all of time and all of space and then obviously, our philosophical and practical approaches to pedagogy – both the pedagogy we take in – and that which we teach.
Truth is, Notion is a Truth.
Words have personal meaning and we use association to create specific constructs from what we have experienced in matter and imagination.
These constructs – whether societal, familial, or personal – have great bearing on the way others relate to us, and how we relate ourselves to one another across the planet and across the hall.
here’s me as a construct – a white american omnisexual (or pansexual) woman-identifying-toward-Z who has societal markers of mental illness and physical limitation that sees me as you see me while feeling my self.
here’s me looking around at all of us in this room of the universe.
Learning how we each ‘do’ feels separatist to me through this journey of knowing about ourselves and one another. But this is an important part. How do we do when it’s more than uncomfortable? When it pushes up against something?
Cole G 