Mirror

It was a familiar visit to the Ordway theater.   I was there for a pre-performance reception and I was looking around for where the reception was taking place.   This was a unique event and I was looking around for where the special reception might be happening.   I noticed a wide open door between two walls and began walking into the next room.

I had walked perhaps five steps before I suddenly realized I was walking toward a wide, floor to ceiling mirror.   I saw, in a flash of realization, how the mirror reflected the complete contents of the room in which I was standing.

I had experienced all the sensation and perception of an open room beyond the imagined doorway.   Lights shined, color and shapes filled the space.   There were people and familiar objects that I had vaguely recognized.    It was like stepping out of a dream when I realized that all I had seen was a reflection of the room in which I stood.   Everything around me was as big and expansive, full of color and shapes, peopled by activity as the room I had been walking into.

Had I actually been walking into a room that existed only in my own mind!

Such is my experience of being in a bedroom that every day seems to surround me with walls and fabric, color and shapes.   I slowly move into a reality that exists only in my attention to them.

I hear the noise of passing cars, and I become aware of cars that my mind constructs from the waves of sound touching my ears.   I touch the sheets of my bed, and I know the impression of fabric and softness.   I glance at my stack of books, and they stir my notion of covers and pages.

Everything around me is a reflection of notions I carry within my consciousness.  The angles, color and firmness of the walls are all familiar to me.    With only a casual glance from me, they seem to correspond to the notion, the construct of lavender walls of my bedroom.

I live in a mirrored world, populated by images and notions I carry within me.   How can I be truly present in such a world.   How do I become not just aware off it but deeply, intimately involved with it.

When I stare into this mirror world, I often try to simply be present to myself.   I slowly become aware of my own body, my own presence.   Just as slowly, I observe that I am part of that mirror world, it is part of me.   I put one foot in front of the other and we walk together into my mirror world, into another day.