Colour

 Goethe's Colour Wheel

What is colour? Is it intrinsic to the object or a creation of neural processing? An article I found here entitled Colour Plays Musical Chairs In Our Brain intrigued me. 

"One view," says Noë, "is that color is a property of the surfaces of objects, not the property we naively think we see, but maybe something like a disposition to absorb and reflect light of certain wavelengths... another view is that... color happens to us. The leaves in the tree are not green. Greenness is just something that happens. In me it’s a kind of sensation that is produced thanks to the activation of my nervous system by those leaves." 

 So, what do you think? What is colour, anyway? 

Dear Sylvia

This post inspired by DVerse ~ write a poem about an imagined conversation/interaction with a famous and/or historical person of your choice.

image credit: Miss Cartier

"An owl's talons clenching at my heart." 

I have found no way out of the mind, either.

Did he annihilate you? Did he crush your flesh?

Why did you and I desire the thing 

that would destroy us

in the end?

Why?

Why did you do it?

When did 

thick and sluggish
cease to become
enough?

Why did so many people

fail you?

Why could no one

see

your despair anguish,

piercing through 

that veil of

paper thin feelings

which weighed so heavily 

in your mind and on your soul?
Could no one see through
the veil?
I think, perhaps, 
many,
finding it tiresome, 
chose not to.

How do we banish

that dark, shadowy thing

which lurks within?

Oh, how I wish

I could talk to you.

How I wish

I could 
touch you,
through your words,
sodden
with your pain.

Is it wrong of me,

is it schadenfreude
or perhaps, selfish,

to want to experience 

your pain and despair

through words
you've written

so that I feel

less solitary

in my own

pain and despair?

Reflections

image credit: More Raindrop Reflections, a photo by RoxanneGalpin on Flickr

I miss you. However wrong that seems, I miss you. Despite the monster you became, the one I had to run from, I somehow have this delusion that you loved me. I tell myself that a sociopathic narcissist lacks the capacity to love. And then I lie to myself, insistent upon your love for me. Am I deluded, or a liar? I’m never sure. I can only describe our time together as surreal. I feel as though the monster wasn’t you. As though, you liked to play with gamma rays in your younger days and that’s the cause of that raging monster which manifests itself inside your body. How can that monster, who deliberately set out to physically harm me, be you ~ a loving man who held me tightly in the aftermath of a frightening nitemare? You became a frightening nitemare, one from which I had to escape, fearing for my life. How is it that I can still love you after all that?
 ~Roxanne Galpin

I wrote that almost two years ago. And yet, the sentiment still seems quite real to me. I made quite a mess of things by taking a beautiful dangerous angel as a paramour. I will call him my paramour because he was forbidden fruit for me, a married woman. I committed an unforgivable faux pas. And sent my marriage into pain filled ruins. What I did was, to me, unforgivable. And fraught with so much pain and longing. A longing that darkens and desiccates the heart. Oh, did he hurt me. And still, with the approaching holidays, I find myself thinking about him. I don't understand how love can overlook all the pain my paramour inflicted upon me.

He frightened me with his drunken rages. He violated me, disregarded my whimpers of pain and pleas for him to stop. And still, I loved him. He raged at me. Time and time again. He struck me, and left a bruise. And still, I wanted to make a future with him. Why? Did I think that I didn't deserve any better? Did I place such little value in myself? I don't have the answer. Perhaps I never will. I'm just beginning to learn that I do deserve better, much better. And so, I keep myself at a distance, prevent myself from thinking of him. For nothing good can come from thinking about my paramour. It would be so easy to pick up my phone and text him. And then I ask myself, what's the point? The answer? There's no point. Only anguish, self-inflicted anguish.

I've learned to savour and cherish the now and all it's richness. I've learned that wrapping myself around the past, however painful, brings nothing but aching inertia. I've learned that, all along I had a man who loved and cherished me ~ my one true thing. I've learned that, sometimes you have to burn the house down in order to rebuild it to it's proper and beautiful form. That's what my life has been about these past 3 years ~ disassembling and reassembling. When I think of the pain I caused my one true thing, I shudder. And when I think of the forgiveness I received from him, I feel so humbled.

I think of healing as a life long process. I think that I've yet to forgive myself for the chaos my decisions and actions caused my one true thing and others who love me. I also think that every unwise decision we make and every painful obstacle we encounter make us the person we've become. And every circumstance that renders us bare and exposed ~ i.e. leaving almost everything I owned behind to go to drug treatment ~ teaches us the true value of life and the people in it.

Not everyone gets a second chance. I did, though. And I feel incredibly grateful for it.

No Words

I cannot go on like nothing has happened. Because something has happened. 26 lives were taken, 20 of them tiny lights that had barely begun burning, and 6 of them teachers, wives, daughters, aunts, mothers, sisters, friends. We are NOT supposed to worry about our children's' safety when they are at school. Children should not feel unsafe at school. Children should not worry about the bad guy coming back to get them. Parents should not survive their children. This is so wrong, so against nature. I watched the news coverage Friday evening, and it gave me chills. It also left me feeling so incredibly sad.

image credit: greenleaf-stock

This is not the time to talk about gun control, or about the social and moral underpinnings of society or about this culture of violence that seems to have swept across society. This is a time to grieve. Plain and Simple. 40 parents are reeling from the loss of their 6 or 7 year old child. Wrap your head around that. Hug your children and other loved ones. Remember the reason for the season. (Hint, it's not presents or shopping or amassing more and more stuff.) Love. Just love.

The Passage of Time

I've waited ... waited for so long. Four long years. In some ways I find it hard to believe that much time has passed. In others, each moment of each day of each year has felt infinite. My bag has been packed for 2 days now, except for the small last minute bits. I have only 2 more sleeps until I fly. I keep looking at the clock this evening, as though that will speed up time. Time feels sluggish. And it grows more sluggish with each glimpse at the clock.

I Am Still A Child

I made some arrangements with my parents, who live three provinces away, for today---Thursday. When these did not happen, I called Mum and Dad. They weren't home. Since my dad's stroke 4 years ago (from which he recovered excellently, you wouldn't really know he ever had a stroke) he can no longer drive, and so my parents have sort of become homebodies ... in Winnipeg you cannot go far without a car when you are an octogenarian. That's simply the nature of Winnipeg. And so if I call them and they are not home, I wait a half hour and call them again. If they don't answer, I start getting worried, envision myself telephoning the hospitals' patient enquiry numbers and having the operator forward me to a nursing station, where a nurse tells me something utterly devastating, which I find myself unable to handle because I am so far away and feel so helpless and do not by any stretch of the imagination feel ready to lose my parents. {whew that was a long sentence, wasn't it?} Well, I feel very grateful for mobile phones, because that is how I reached my dad on his, to find out they had an outing to the shopping centre this afternoon and were about to call my uncle for a ride back home.

How quickly my imagination runs away on me, totally red-lining it, nearly sending me into an emotional tail spin! The bottom line is I love my Mum and Dad loads and loads and losing them is my greatest fear. When I start to think how it will be like, how it will feel, I get anxious, and a suffocating darkness seizes my soul. A friend of mine once told me, "Roxanne when you lose your mother, you're gonna lose your mind." He based that simply on the ease and depth and intensity of my telephone conversations with her, during the few months he couch-surfed at my flat. No truer words were spoken. However, just because I don't have really long, intense, heart-to-heart conversations with my Dad, doesn't mean I don't love and cherish him just as much. In fact I was a daddy's girl growing up. And still am. In many ways my heart belongs to him, and his to me. Every day I am thankful that I still have my parents: many people at my age (43) do not. I am thankful that I have generous, loving and supportive parents. I miss them loads and loads. And I cannot ever take them for-granted. Ever.

Contemplating Freedom

My absolute love of historical fiction leads me to appreciate things that I otherwise would never give a second thought. Freedoms, in particular. Desmond Tutu said once that only those individuals who've had their freedom removed can ever fully appreciate the gift of freedom. I agree. Books that have transported me back the the 15th and 16th century have introduced me to a time in which rulers designated thoughts of human equality as heretical. Just pause and think for a moment, of the implications; can you imagine a life in which no freedom of equality exists? Can you imagine a life in which you could see yourself executed or burned at the stake for practising an "un-sanctioned" religion? Can you imagine a world in which the mere reading of The Bible, for a common, lay person, would spell heresy and ultimately, death? Can you imagine an life so cloaked in a darkness which blots out any new ideas, new knowledge, or new ways of seeing things? Google Galileo, and read about his life and works; you will see the enormity of it all, of life lived under the damocles' sword of a united Church and State.

Rooting for the So-Called Villain

I've spent a great deal of time these past weeks reading historical fiction. Currently I find myself reading a series about the Borgias, narrated from the POV of a (fictional) poisoner. Long before the television series about the original crime family, and long before I'd come across any of the books about them, I knew of the treacherous reputation of the Borgias. Corruption, bribery, and the like ~ none of these befitting for the occupant of St. Peter's Throne. History paints these Borgias as villains, at best. Yet, in reading these fictionalized accounts of them, I cannot help but empathize with Borgia and his family.

I recently read Dracula: The Un-dead, a sequel to the original Bram Stoker novel. Once again, we see a monster portrayed as worthy of our empathy. This book depicts a monster capable of feeling, giving and receiving love. How can this be? Does it seem naive, then, to view the world as a series of contrasts of black and white? When does a being become it's heinous actions? Do we ever need to consider the context? Perhaps, instead of good and evil, we have shades of each. This complicates things, our understanding of things.

I find it interesting when authors paint their stories such that the bad guy seems worthy of readers' sympathies.