enfinblue's diary

enfinblue's Bluey (credit to Fifi for the nickname!) Diaryland Diary

"I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart." -Vinc3nt V@n Gogh

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Oh triteness thou art my middle name

First, a thanks to teranika for kindly saying that I was hilarious rather than ready to be declared mentally incompetent yesterday!

Today I'm still giggling. I'm actually laughing most of the time, even when I'm being serious. It's perhaps unfortunate that this doesn't come through in my diary. The same goes for my facial expressions. When Dan and I have coffee he often tells me that he gets caught up in watching my eyebrows go up and down, and the animation in my eyes and my mouth. I have an excessively expressive face. My mother used to tell me to stop it. Perhaps that's why the problem grew in scope. :)

Anyhow. I'm mentioning this as this entry was actually written in a spirit of lightness, only comes across with my typical leaden earnestness in text. So here goes.

I haven't washed my hair in two days. It's sticking up all over the place.

This is the Christmas of which I have always dreamed!

Can you believe it?

I thought about this a bit yesterday. I could not have been happier than I was spending Christmas morning sleeping in and listening to music, and Christmas afternoon walking in the snow with my best friend following a gross misidentification of H3r Royal Highn3ss. I've always wanted a peaceful, quiet, reflective Christmas.

I struggle a great deal with the fact that many of my intellectual impulses force me to reject church. I was raised an Anglican. Listening to O Come, O Come Emmanu3l (here) on the radio yesterday sent shivers down my spine, reminding me of how much I loved to sing responses to the minister in the high church service when I was a little girl sitting next to my grandmother.

I have a stack of comparative religion books in my living room. I'm intensely attracted to any conversations with religious leaders and spiritual seekers. It's almost as though in my life I'm coasting towards the inevitable, but I can't coast towards faith without putting the brakes on. The search for the soul is the only thing in life perhaps, however, on which I am perpetually fixated.

I've often wondered about any biological connections to religiosity. I've heard news of science indicating the existence of some.

I mention this because it repeatedly occurs to me that my undeniable attraction to the "spiritual" is underpinned by the intense emotional frequency on which I experience pretty much everything else.

I've always been extra sensitive to light, to sound, to taste, to emotional cues from others. I *feel* and intuit my way through life. I've tried to tame these tendencies through my educational and career choices. In a way I've tried to buy myself some credibility.

But I'm not so foolish as to think that our biological configuration - and my tautly-wired emotional one - can be divorced from the way that we manage any exposure to religious thought.

I don't believe in fate. I'm inclined to think, however, more often than not, that our destinies are mapped out in the hardwiring of our brains. They define the turns that we would take given a particular set of choices, and then the ordering of the choices with which we are confronted opens up the vast array of combinations and permutations of experiences that can eventuate. So there's randomness and precise determination cohabiting.

It's like the desire in me for a spiritual connection is a matter of the vibration of my emotions being somehow beyond the grasp of my intellect or the existing knowledge I've stumbled upon. And yet my intuition tells me at the same time to trust that there's a connection, that there are links between all things. And if you can trust that there are yet undiscovered pathways connecting all things, in a way you can trust that faith in any one particular set of beliefs or deity is unnecessary. It's like raising the bar on *faith* another level.

As usual, me babbling and making almost no sense to anyone but me.

So I'm here in what feels like the gloaming, even though it is only 3 p.m., reveling in what is yet another completely indolent day. I don't know how I will convince myself to return to work on the 2nd!

I should now post the pics of the canal that I took with C. yesterday. Yes, why not? You'll see in a couple of weeks how much more lovely it will be once skating season begins. The weather has been too mild in the last few days and the canal has split open in places. Here we go, starting with some icicles on the house next door, C. at xmas, some properly-proportioned shortbread :), spanikopita triangles... :) The shelters that you can see on the side of the canal are buildings put up for changing, to serve "beav3r tails" (basically cinammon and sugar-covered, flat doughnuts that look like...tails), and skate rentals of course. In other pics you can see the stairs leading down to the canal from various neighbourhood points.