Those funhouse mirrors and glass alleys were gentle amusement. It only cost a ticket or two, and I didn’t have to sprint through, I could pause when one of those distorted images was particularly entertaining. I liked the one that made me look like a pinhead pyramid, or was I a pear? It was just weird enough I wanted to figure out how they did it. It was physics, of course, so I can blame the state fair midway for leading me straight to Northwestern University’s Integrated Sciences Program, similar to a funhouse mirror, full of twisted expressions and personal compressions and an enlightening attempt to force myself into a shape my spirit simply could not acquire.

There was other glass. There were the avenues that seemed to stretch to the horizon, but on which I would suddenly come up short, my nose flattened against an unseen barrier. Ha-ha! It only cost a ticket.

There were people and places, that generated kaleidoscopic reflections. Imagine the contours of your loved one coated in silver, so that any light that reaches them bounces back helter-skelter: forehead, dimpled cheeks and chin, the little concave dishes of the ears, chest and breast, belly and navel, hips and genitalia, thigh and knee and ankle and toe and toenail and hangnail and all.

If you stood before your silvered loved one you would see all of your features reflected back, but twirled and hashed and splashed all over the place… you wouldn’t be able to see him or her at all… you’d think your hair was the leaves of a tree, your face altogether pointed and shrew-like. You’d be afraid (if you were a manly man) that your chest was altogether too effeminate (if your partner were a womanly woman), and the area around your hips altogether too… something (please ignore that voice); let’s dizzyingly switch roles, and find your breasts are too small (ignore it, it is the same voice), or that you are too short or too round or too tall or too invisible, overbearingly bright or unbearably dull, too this and too that, without once, without even once, having actually seen your beautiful self.

“Mystic Mirror” by Horst Schmier @ DeviantArt.com

The silver body experiment is not exactly remarkable, though I just invented it and you just performed it. It happens every day, so subtly you can scarcely tell it’s happening. Sometimes the silver is words, or someone’s mood, or the weather, or something you ate, or the manipulated news or belligerent neighbor or self-deceiving leader. There are as many Ors as there are Toos, and an accurate accounting of them nearly always tallies up to an Inadequate You.

Here’s what I find delightful. When watching your own silly attitudes and listening to the outrageous things you say, to be part of the silver experiment of yourself, it is delightful to begin flattening out that glass, your own glass. How empowering. How careful you become with your heart. And when you learn how shimmering and generally unfaithful that external mirror really is, the always-inquisitive heart looks for another way of looking.

“Mirrors” by Tomi Pajunen @ DeviantArt.com

I know that the longer I have practiced being on the planet, the better I have become at listening to stillness, and discarding noise. It’s such a service to my relationships. What used to hurt and infuriate is more often greeted with a gentler “No… I don’t believe that.” Spoken silently, it is even gentler.

And this is when I met Catalina. When I expected to ward off projections, there were clean reflections; and when I expected some element of me to speak and be unheard, or reach and be untouched, the dance was instead balanced and delightfully complete. We were talking face-to-face on opposite sides of one ocean – me tidying up our belongings on the sunset side of the Atlantic, and she making space for them on the sunrise side – and I felt, and I said: when I met you, I met me. That’s why I write tonight.

“Infinity Candle” by Passion and the Camera @ DeviantArt.com

There are reasons to take up your roots and to replant yourself. Even if this season’s bloom is as beautiful as the last, maybe with this new regard for beauty it bows better to its elegant design.

It is nine days until I travel.

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