Naming the Invisible

I know that most of life is invisible. In my experience of being a person, even the private invisible, the felt invisible is imperceptible. Because we can and do feel our inner world of self, but it is a jumble of currents— undocumented, enigmatic. And what we do see-feel clearly is often a paper slice of what lies underneath, inaccessible.

This has always been troubling to me. How can I live fully inside this bog of meaning and intention? What is guiding my life? What energies within sway me this way and that? Does my old pain live me? Do borrowed ideas? (Are they even true?) A misspent life looks, to me, like a wooden marionette.

This is why I give names to everything I come across in my private invisible.

We interact with the sunlit world and all that is noticed can be seen. An exchange of energy takes place. We deposit whatever we have for the world and take its little deposit. Each interaction leaves a unique record in our archive of meaning which becomes, essentially, the world we carry within ourselves.

This ersatz world is dark and shapely, and often heavy. We make ourselves inside this replica of what actually is. Being happens in this kind of darkness.

You have to feel your way along the long corridors of time that the body keeps. These hallways contain fragments of every exchange with the sunlit world.

I go across the hallways holding out my hands, patting. When I touch one I can see-feel its shape but don’t know its story. I ask its name and write about it. I hope you’ll forgive my metaphors. These are the many names in the world I carry within.

Then I linger and hear what it has to say.