Energy and Trust

My internal landscape has experienced a great change in the weather lately.  I try not to let too many things affect me, but in this case, I think I need to let it. 

I've always been pretty well-grounded.  I've always had a certain way of seeing things.  I'm extremely open-minded, but I always take what I hear and see along with my perception of the world as it has always been.  In other words, I take everything into account as long as it jives with what I know.  Which is pretty much the case with everyone, but I allow more leeway probably than most.  I allow more space for the metaphysical and unexplainable. 

But these new things, this new person:  they've rocked me to the very core.  I'm as I've always been.  Nothing about my personality or my beliefs has changed.  It's just the way everything relates in my head.  The way I look at the world. 

I've always been self-conscious to a fault, even self-centered.  Really, the better word is probably "self-contained."  I live my life in my head.  Not much makes it out.  As I've gotten older, I've learned to trust what goes on in there a little more and therefore I allow more out than I used to.  But I still have a problem letting myself out to play with the other kids.  There's a wall there that's hard to get over.  The metaphor I used with C was that the walls in my head have chinks in them that allow me in as mist, but nothing more.  Just enough to see a little bit of what's there, but not enough to do anything with it.  This metaphor came about when C told me he felt like he'd broken down several walls in his mind.  The way he did this was with energy.

The energy concept is one I took with a  grain of salt when C first mentioned it to me.  I didn't dismiss it, I just wasn't sure what to do with it.  So I sat back and listened.  The idea is that the body is full of energy and this energy can be controlled, manipulated, and put to good use on oneself, objects, and even other people.  As I understand it, it's used in martial arts, massage therapy, and numerous Eastern disciplines.  For a while, I just watched and learned, not sure if this sensation I was feeling was actually energy or if my mind was playing tricks on me. 

But that's just the point.  It is the mind.  But it's not a trick.  I didn't fully accept this until the other night when C talked me through an exercise.  I can't explain it, but it was a feeling I was familiar with.  It's the trill of panic when you're scared, the flush of warmth when you see someone you're attracted to, the movement of thoughts when you're concentrating.  It's all that.  Once I learned how to focus it, I could visualize what I wanted to do with it and make it work.  Granted, all I can do so far is feel it and move it.  But I'm getting better.  Last night, I learned how to produce warm energy.  It was all in my head.  But it was real, and C felt it on his skin.  It was real because we both let it be real. 

It's common knowledge that humans only use 10% of our brains.  Like the line from "Contact," "seems like an awful waste of space."  You can't tell me the other 90% is useless tissue.  It's full of neurons and electricity.  Full of energy.  This is about learning how to use it.  Physically, mentally, and emotionally.  It's what makes us human. 

And it has taught me how to trust myself.  More and more, I've allowed the external in and let myself out.  I'm not all the way there.  I'm still struggling with the fears and worries that hold me inside myself.  That seems to be the rub to everyone learning about energy.  And everyone who doesn't know or even accept its power.

The challenge is no greater than with everything I feel for C himself.  He's subtle, very even-tempered.  It's hard to see where his heart is.  I know it's gigantic and solid gold, but I just can't find it.  At least so far I can't.  I've spent all morning considering where I should look.  I've seen glimpses of it in smiles, glances, his touch, his embrace.  But only glimpses.  He keeps it guarded and relies on his mind to govern it, I think.  When he trusts himself with it, then he may open a window.  Whereas my instinct is to hold it out for anyone to see until I realize maybe they're frightened by the bloody spectacle and quickly put it away.  Through experience, I've learned to resist my instinct.  I still wonder if I should.  Maybe what I need to learn is how to follow my instinct without blurting it out.  Maybe I should wordlessly tap him on the shoulder and invite him to peek through the window, rather than pull the whole organ straight out of my chest and wave it under his nose yelling, "See what I got!" 

I depend too much on the spoken word for confirmation.   Sometimes words drain energy.  They cancel it out or distract from it.  Through all my considering this morning, I've decided I need to relax and shut the hell up.  That's the source of most of my problems with people.  I just don't know how to relax with them around.  I'm too worried about how much I like or dislike them and don't know how to deal with it when they like or dislike me.  That's not what's important.  What's important is what you learn, give, and receive. 

Negative or positive, it's all just energy.  And energy penetrates every word.  Sometimes the energy is too great and renders the word useless.  Sometimes the word solidifies the energy, makes it concrete. 

I get the feeling that once I've learned to trust myself, I'll know exactly when the word is needed and when the energy is enough.

A Word on Words

Hey kids.  I've been rather preoccupied with the passive insanity (or is that inanity?) of my mental landscape, which appears to have experienced a little bit of a tectonic shift. 

Poverty has forced me inward which is the last thing I need, truth be told.  But with no options for diversion, I'm hoping I'll get bored enough to finish washing the dishes that are still packed in boxes (since April) and finish setting up my apartment.  It's starting to get on my nerves (yes, it takes me four months to be oppressed by a mess). 

But that's not why I felt like blogging today.

As some of y'all know, I'm a legal assistant.  Lately my job has been making it more and more difficult for me feel in any way important.   I had one of my impatient days yesterday and I REALLY had to watch myself.  Everything pissed me off.  So in an attempt to vent some of this dissatisfaction, I tried to wrap my head around why my job was making me so angry.

Then it came to me.  It's the use of words.  Words are EXTRAORDINARILY precious and interesting to me, so I have a very pronounced reverence for the way they're used.  It just occurred to me HOW differently they're used in varying pursuits.

I decided that lawyers EXPLOIT words.  A lawyer's use of words is crucial to his job, which is why a lot of lawyers get their undergrad in English or Linguistics.  It's crucial because they have to be able to twist a word around and make it work for them - to wrench a version of the truth from it - the version that serves their purpose the best.

Writers/novelists EXALT words (at least some of us try to - admittedly not all accomplish this).  A writer looks a word from every angle, caresses it, gets to know it, and dresses it up.  Different authors have different senses of style of course.  Some prefer a simple summer dress while others want to put their words into showy frocks.  Some writers have no fashion sense - at all.  (I just finished reading the Twilight series - laugh all you want - and while the characters are good and the story is addictive, the language is DREADFUL.  In Meyer's case I think the words were just a means to an end - "well hell, I reckon my words can't go out naked, so I'll dress them in whatever smells the cleanest.") 

Media EXPLOITS, USES, and NEGATES words.  In other words, media (admittedly not all) destroys their meanings and makes them mean something else.  I'm not attacking the media.  They can't help what they are.  They feel a need to either present the words naked, polish them to a nice shine, or splatter mud all over them.  This changes how the world views the word.  The media is where a perfectly healthy and appealing word goes to die.

Scholars and academia try to EXPLAIN them. I kind of fit into this category as well as the writer's category.  Scholars have to understand the words.  Scholars make an attempt to work against the media to bring the dead word back to life or to change it into something more useful than the mangled mess that was left.  Scholars know where and how the word was born, and they try to reflect that.
 
All of the above are reasons why I have a Compact OED (and why it's one of my prized possessions), about 20 books on word origins, and a few dictionaries and thesauri.  I try to take the ill uses with a grain of salt until I can see the truth or the lie behind them.  I study their shape and color and decide what outfit would most become them.  I study it so I don't forget it.

I really wish more people cared about our sad little words.  Maybe they wouldn't be so easy to manipulate if they did.  And indirectly, the people caring wouldn't be so easy to manipulate either.