This moment is vibrating, the formation of an event horizon.
Tonight I feel the tension before the birth of circumstellar disks, accretion disks, spinning matter in flat bands. Two disks occupy near space. One expands to spiral outward, colliding with and altering all it touches; the other spins debris inward, as if to a black hole.
Inauguration Eve ©19 January 2017 8 p.m.|Sandra R. Davidson
Spiraling In or Spiraling Out? [Image Credit: ESO/L. Calçada]
“I’d like to have balance in my life, but I don’t feel I do as a rule. Sometimes for short periods of time I seem to achieve balance, and it feels real good—so good that I’d like to have it all the time.”
Balance today was revealing and also self-revealing. I wouldn’t have it any other way, and it’s hard to admit where I have been and how different I want to be from a reactionary recluse.
Jean writes, “…I don’t have to spend energy any longer scolding myself for being lazy. I’m not lazy; I’m terrified….” I take a deep breath and support my jaws in my hands as I stare at the screen. I’m not a survivor of ritual abuse or cults. I don’t have multiple personalities. Abuse. That is what we have in common and I’ll not crack myself open to count the ways, means and times.
Jean goes on, “…the false belief that I am only worth something if I am being useful to others. …but my instinct is to put myself last. …I am worth as much as every other human being on earth—no more, no less.”
Agh. My husband, he tries to unravel my illogic when I say I am using more resources than I am giving back. I seek some—well, balance, of course, but also purpose. I do not wear a watch. That I cannot have in our home a ticking clock counting the wasted minutes and counting down to whenever it is that I will cease to exist is ridiculous but necessary or I too would be (and have been) paralyzed.
I want to turn away from you, from what you feel because your words, experiences ignite a volcano at my core—destructive, cleansing, and eventually the bedrock from which new growth rises.
Turning away is not an option. I can accept what pieces of you are so familiar to me, and I can remind myself that I know, I already know. I often just need to remember and your timing is usually right when I need reminding.
Here’s yer swab…
The Supreme Court has decided to take on a case involving the process of arrests. Identified—check. Photographed—check. Fingerprinted—check. Cheek swabed—uh, wha? Yeah, it is done before conviction in some places. See, the law has been closing a lot of cold cases this way, too. DNA.
The law figures you can voluntarily take a cheek swab (or perhaps they’ll have you drink a root beer and get your saliva that way). Enter it into a database and you have a bar code of DNA with a name, photo and fingerprint to match.
And now I wonder about those offers that claim to trace your ancestry with just your saliva for $100 to $150 bucks. So you can pay for your bar code, too, since these companies would have to fork over to the law any records the lawmen require.
And here we are, griping about social media tracking and browser tracking, what companies do with information we submit—because it’s all voluntary, you see. You don’t have to use the product. © 2013 Sandra Davidson
I wrote regarding race in the entry Entitlement.
Another article has me thinking. It began with this post on Ebony and a few of the comments there. A minor epiphany today in response to another commenter whose entry hit on something that has itched at me for some while.
What if discrimination of all kinds is three-fold?
1) That we are aware others like ourselves are discriminated against, therefore we watch for subtle signs (as [the commenter posted] the word paranoid).
2) That our personal and collective histories tell us discrimination against ourselves and our collective is going to happen, setting up the expectation, and therefore the defensive stance, which others can perceive though they may not know exactly what it is.
3) That our preconditioning to separateness, different-ness rolls from our beings as a cold forbidding, a waist-high wall we can and do hide behind, and therefore aren’t seen normally.
You’ll find my other comments in that Ebony article as well. Set the sort to “newest first” and look for Sandra Davidson. Please, tell me what you think. This is important to me, as it is to all of us, really. Who doesn’t see themselves as set apart at times?
©2012 Sandra Davidson
A Layering of Perception 