Interesting, how a chain of minute events can open the floodgates of pain and let everything out. What is happening is far more subtle than how one would imagine it. I often think that loss of sight is the least of it. My habitus is changing, how I hold my body, the influence of perceiving so differently on my mental patterns. I used to do many things simultaneously; now, however I’m noticing a change towards the serial, the procedural. The way I navigate the streets is more akin to the navigation methods of the Polynesians. Or it is like the verbal maps Ohthere made of his voyage from the Polish coast, around Denmark, past the Shetlands all the way to the King to tell his story. I’ve always been a procedural navigator much more than a conceptual one; it’s simply the best way if you’re coastal saying or kayaking. Other new patterns manifest in my life. Other ways of being.
The newness of it.
I own four tibetan ritual daggers - phurbas. I use them for certain practices I maintain, and they’re wrapped in blue silk, their carvings only visible in ritual, only to the initiated. They’re made of wood, each one characteristic, instantly recognizable. Now that they’re hidden from my view as well, their power is even more evident. I feel for the naga - serpents on the blades, the lotus petals, the dorje that crowns every dagger. To be driven into the ground for protection, to impale demons. Way-markers. I’ve danced with them, I’ve carried them from place to place, when we were moving house so much. Always carrying them separately, never packing them with the rest of my things.
Markers, Beacons. Lightning conductors. Waypointers