OleopteneA blog for Mara Collins

Sympathetic Magic

October 8th, 2008

Oh, I love the realization that occasionally comes, that this being my blog, I get to set the rules. So I can say that I had a darker moment last week, and leave it at that, because it isn’t something to be worked out in the blog, and it’s incidental to the fact that faster than you can say “Pisces out of water” what wasn’t okay flipped and became okay, and that that is what is more interesting to me.

Dark moments tend to be sort of generic in the blend of insecurity and frustration and powerlessness and fear and anger that sort of amorphously switch into each other whenever I try to nail the feeling down, whatever factor or combination of factors is bringing it on for me. And so it isn’t surprising that what can turn it around tends to be a reminder of my powers. I spent some of the time that was hard reorganizing my closet, tossing clothes that have gotten too tight (repeating to myself, the clothes are supposed to fit me, not the other way round) and the process was not, by any stretch of the imagination or the waistband, fun, and still, last night I was putting my laundry away and felt this tiny ping of joy at the order in the closet, a small refuge (all mine!) in a chaotic house, with an array of the clothes that fit, feel good, express something I like about who I am, like armor. My closet is where I begin and (because of the laundry hamper inside it) end my clothes-wearing day, and so it’s a frame on all the things I have to do that seem challenging to me. And it’s not anything fancy, my clothes tend toward comfort and functionality and not requiring a lot of thought, and my closet is tiny, tucked into a sloping attic roof. But I think my sister and I both picked up as small children on my mother cleaning and rearranging when stressed, because we have remarked that we both have the tendency to do it, and in the end it is something that works for me.

The radio picked up on the dark mood and kept playing stories like this one about how we look for patterns when things feel beyond our control, even finding images in random marks. What I found most interesting in the story was the idea that asking people to talk about a personal value shifted the balance in their feeling of powerlessness and made them less likely to pick out images in random patterns. In some ways that is sort of frightening, right? that holding beliefs makes you feel powerful? It makes me worry that we’ll all end up fundamentalists, unwilling to question any of our own beliefs because it feels so good to be empowered. What is more annoying than somebody with different beliefs from my own that are all impenetrable and unshakable? And yet, I dance around my beliefs, measure them against each other, include in them as much respect as I can muster for other beliefs, and still they feel like a source of power, like my closet. And when I write that, it surprises me, metaphor-melder that I am, how I like the resonance of my closet as a set of beliefs. That it doesn’t go out and solve my problems for me, that it requires maintenance and adjustment, making sure everything still fits. And so it’s weird that ordering my closet was a sort of sympathetic magic, getting me to re-center on what I do value. (Begging off on the conflation of “values” and “beliefs” and the degree of choice in both of them?)

So I feel grounded again in listening to music that makes me feel good, in being able to listen sympathetically as a friend goes through a list of things overwhelming her and being able to hold and soothe her child at least long enough for her to get lunch. And it occurs to me that I feel powerful not because I believe in/value compassion or generosity but because I occasionally am privileged enough to get to be the agent of those things.

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