What is Your Mirror?
This year has been a dynamic one. Physically and metaphysically I have been moving a lot. And a little. I have been stuck and I have been unstuck floating in the breeze or catching the winds of an unfurled sail and an unfurled story.
One thing I keep being confronted with, as I move places, context, is mirrors.
I spent a good few months in the English countryside absorbing stories and the magic that that landscape with its myriads of greens and Faerie history presents to those who visit. I felt good. In part because I was very focused on story and my own writing and storytelling development. Also because I spent a lot of time outside and eating biodynamic food plucked fresh from the surrounding farms.
But I am a city girl at heart, and I would head back to the city, visiting friends in London or wherever, most weekends.
One weekend, while walking around London town, I realised how quickly I would be preoccupied with what I was wearing or how my hair looked or…things I had rarely considered for too long just the day before in the country.
It isn’t like my vanity changes so dramatically day to day, and being sensitive to context I reflected - was this because of how often I was seeing myself?
"Mirror Mirror on the wall…"
In big (Western? modern?) cities like London, Sydney, NY…mirrors and mirrored surfaces are everywhere. Many surfaces are glassed. Little cafes and spaces are enlarged with mirrors.
In the country I had barely glanced at my own reflection.
And it wasn’t that I wasn’t going out (English countryside rivals any city for amount of bars and pubs per capita). Nor was it that I didn’t care about how I looked. I do. It is more that I noticed I would see myself in glass in the morning briefly and rarely again until bedtime.
In the country, nature was my mirror. In the city, I am being continuously confronted with my own reflection, my own outer self.
I suspect this makes sense why we (well, I) can get so consumed with myself and consumption - what to buy, that I need to buy, how I look and so forth…so obsessed with the individual over the whole.
Because we so rarely see the whole. The nature that feeds us. The earth that supports us. We rarely feel the soil and water and grass beneath our feet. We can almost forget that the milk in our coffee came from a cow or a soy plant over the supermarket. That the mushrooms in the salad travelled from China or that the air we breath makes its trips around the world. Especially from climate control offices. Or that our clothes are spun from fabric that grew in a field as cotton or on the back of sheep.
Context is such a powerful force in our lives…and our ability to disconnect from our earth and nature in the city is an easy one.
So I sitting in a city and wondering - what is my mirror at the moment? And what is it that I want to see in my world? In the world?
(And I am thinking that tonight I should head to the beach and watch the waves crash on the sand and breath and be thankful for being able to see…)
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August 14th, 2007 at 10:55 am
I have a colleague at work who’s blind and your parting comment rings truer now that I know him.
August 17th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
I recently had an experience that taught me to see anew what I thought I had already learned to see very well, what I thought I knew so well that I could picture it perfectly in my mind’s eye.
I just finished taking a group of people who had never been there around a place very near and dear to my heart - sat on the beach with them and watched them see the blue waters of the mediterranean for the first time, saw the light in their eyes as the hills of Jerusalem came into view. Sometimes, really seeing means understanding anew that which you have already understood, taking pleasure in a new perspective of the old.
August 17th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
I recently had an experience that taught me to see anew what I thought I had already learned to see very well, what I thought I knew so well that I could picture it perfectly in my mind’s eye.
I just finished taking a group of people who had never been there around a place very near and dear to my heart - sat on the beach with them and watched them see the blue waters of the mediterranean for the first time, saw the light in their eyes as the hills of Jerusalem came into view. Sometimes, really seeing means understanding anew that which you have already understood, taking pleasure in a new perspective of the old.