The Silent Angel & the Color-Blind Heart

I will love the indelible pattern of you

Kathleen Raine wrote that "No man's life belongs to himself, each is a recipient of the one life." I feel that. There's an aliveness running through me, and it's the same one running through you. But that same aliveness is changed by my way of expressing it, my way of receiving it — by your way of expressing it, your way of receiving it. It gets reshaped, rewoven; spun on the loom of you, on the loom of me, on the loom of this world we're wandering together.

It's a strange thing to say, as a faceless writer writing to a faceless reader, but I do want to say it: I love you. I feel a real tenderness and joy for you — some of you I love deeply, personally; most of you I love more abstractly; but I do have some form of love for all of you. I may not understand you very well, and I may not understand how to love you in a way that you can receive. But I love you anyway, and I want to learn how to shape my love so you can feel safe and happy receiving it.

In each of us there is the same eros, the same aliveness; and in each of us, that eros takes on its own crystallization, its own flow, its own personality. This isn't a problem, or something to be undone. It doesn't need to be re-flattened into oneness. It's a gift, a play of uniqueness and the soulful specificity of the ten thousand things. And in that play, we have some challenges. (What's the use of play without challenge?)

The life that courses through you is the life that courses through me — but the pattern that life takes inside you isn't the pattern that life takes inside me. It's easy to love the raw, coursing life that we share, but to love the specific pattern of you and your aliveness — that takes something else.

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There are a lot of terms for the inner pattern or personality that each person's eros takes on — the muse, the genius, the daimon, the little voice, intuition. Lately, I'm partial to the angel.

For me, the angel has been the voice of aliveness for a long time; the presence that connects me with eros, with desire, with not just what I want, but what the world wants from me. You artists and meditators out there hear me, I think. There's a feeling like inspiration, like intuition, like a needfulness in the heart of the world, asking you, tugging you, urging you to do something, to make something, to be or become the creature that's trying to be born through you.

In my life, that becoming has felt like an upwelling. It comes from my body, my gut, my heart, and works its way up and out into how I talk, how I write, how my face and my voice find themselves dynamically responding in conversation; it starts deep in my embodied intuition, just a whispered suspicion of a hazy something, and it works its way out into the values that mold my life into the shape it wants to take.

That's what I'm talking about when I talk about the voice of the angel. When I say things like "Sometimes, the angel whispers in your ear; sometimes, she takes you by the hand and leads you into what happens next," I mean this deep, buried sense of what must happen between the world and me, if I can just let it happen through me.

What's the use of play without challenge? Lately, a new challenge: the voice of the angel has gone quiet.

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Being colorblind has shaped my view of the world, literally and figuratively. There are few better trainings in the limitations of experience than the daily reminder that I'm incapable of perceiving things that other people have no trouble with.

There are some tricks I've learned to get around being colorblind. For example, I can't see the color purple, but if my eyes keep telling me something is blue, then pink, then blue, then pink -- I've learned that means it's a light shade of purple. I can't differentiate skin tones well enough to tell if I'm sunburned, or if someone is blushing – but I've learned that if I let my eyes go soft, stop looking at details, and let a hazier image of the skin take shape, I can start to make out blushes and blotches and burns a bit more clearly. I often can't tell if something is red or green, but I've learned that if I can find something I know is one or the other, and keep it in my line of sight, it helps identify the unknown color much more accurately.

Colorblindness has made it much easier to notice some of the other ways we're all stuck in our own perceptions, missing things that are obvious to others. All of us have misperceptions, total failures of intuition around different parts of the world — many of the ones I care about seem to stem from the blind spots of my heart and my gut.

There's gotta be dozens of these, the ways that I misunderstand, misinterpret, and generally misconstrue other people's actions, their words, the ways their minds work. A standout one lately has been the inaccuracies in how avoidantly and anxiously attached people perceive each other. Another perennial example is the ways that men and women talk past each other, blame each other, fail to understand that there's a different perception of the world behind those eyes they're looking into. STEM people versus Humanities people, introverts versus extroverts, traumatized and un-traumatized nervous systems, on and on and on, all the other dozens of dichotomies and categories and psyche-shapes people fall into.

We can only trust our intuitions to a certain point when it comes to the words and actions of other people. The upwelling voice of the angel I talked about, coming up from the gut and the heart and into the world — it's often wrong when it comes to our blind spots. It's colorblind to the varied shades of love, hate, annoyance, interest, preoccupation, yearning, worry... — more precisely, it's blind to how those things are expressed, how they look from person to person.

Those little tricks I learned to manage colorblindness?, none of them really work unless my intuition and intellect are both equally in the mix. I need the intellect to hold the context and the tricks, and I need my intuition to tell me what I'm noticing when I open my awareness and stop getting fixated on trying to see the color.

If I use my intuition alone, I just see the wrong color and go with it. If I use my intellect alone, my brain seems to decide what color something is and then change my perception in that direction. (This might sound strange to the non-colorblind, but you can see a really similar dynamic in this audio illusion.)

The same thing happens with interpersonal misunderstandings. If I use my intuition alone, I misunderstand someone and the situation gets mucked up. If I use my intellect alone, I'll find something that makes sense, but isn't necessarily accurate, and things still get mucked up.

Over the years, I’ve mucked up a lot in one direction or the other. I’ve lost friends because I overthought the ways they were misreading me, which opened me up to further misreading. I’ve missed my shot with amazing women because I couldn’t intuit how their sense of intimacy was wired. I’ve withdrawn over and over again from friendships, from groups, from connection, out of fear of mucking things up again. I’ve withdrawn for weeks at a time to write, to journal, to endlessly spiral in on the perfect phrase, the perfect image, the single crystalline ekphrasis that will finally make everyone understand me, that will connect me with my people, that will reel in the love and affection that my clumsy presence couldn’t.

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The role of the angel is to show us what we already know. We have to go out into the world and find all the threads on our own, but then the angel (the muse, the unfolding eros) shows us how they weave together.

But what happens then when the angel wants to show us something we don't already know? When there's something we need to see, but it's in a blind spot?

That, I think, is when the voice of the angel goes quiet.

The upwelling intuition has to stop, because we need time to reverse the direction of the system. Rather than inklings coming up from the gut and the heart, and growing into our minds and into the world, we need to start from the other side. We have to find the missing pieces and approach them with intellect, working and practicing with them up close and personal until they start to sink in; until they start to become intuitive to the heart, until they become gut instincts. Only then can we trust the upwelling again, trust the intuitive gut feel for what things mean, for what comes next, for what is wanted from us.

Only when we know — not just in the mind, but on a deep, embodied level — only then can the angel show us just what it is we now know. Only then can the stars suddenly snap into constellations.

In more concrete terms, this means I need to learn how people of different attachment styles work, and practice relating to them better. It means I need to deeply understand how trauma affects people and stays with them, and how a well-regulated nervous system changes someone's perception, and I need to learn to read and navigate those waters. It means I need to figure out what's up with the way STEM folks see the world. 

Over time, learning and practicing with all this will become more intuitive, just like any other skill. Once that happens, new possibilities for eros and aliveness will start to open up. They always do.

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It's easy to love people who are pretty similar to me. The aliveness I share with them is shaped into a familiar enough configuration that I know how to love it, how to receive love from it. There are also, of course, people I find it easy to love even though they are very different from me. Their patterns and my patterns fit in ways that are easy to appreciate and exchange aliveness with.

I want to go a little further; I want to approach everyone's aliveness, everyone's constellated eros, everyone's angel, and I want to find a way to love it, to love them, genuinely and assiduously. That seems to be where the silence of the angel is pointing me — towards a road where my intellect is the key to loving more fully, and where loving more fully is the key to unfolding what the world's eros wants from me.

I’ve always felt like the world wants intellect from me, like it’s trying to sharpen, deepen, and ground me because it wants my mind in a particular shape – and I’ve always felt like my intellect is for heady stuff. For scholarship and concepts and books and study. I’ve been shocked lately (the angel never stops shocking) to be confronted with the obvious: that the mind isn’t just for heady stuff. The mind belongs deeply to the heart. 

The mind belongs deeply to the heart.

This is what’s in the silence of the angel: following my gut and my heart isn’t enough, it can’t be. And integrating the mind isn’t a matter of adding concepts and frameworks into the mix: it’s a matter of evolving the prowess of the heart.

I will find my ways to love you, to shape and plant and alloy my affection into a configuration your angel can appreciate. I will love the indelible pattern of you. After many failures and false starts, after mistakes and muck, my mind will come home to this colorblind heart, and together they will turn to the challenge at hand. I’ll turn to the challenge at hand. I’ll turn towards the courage and artistry I need to live life up close.

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