It is so human to make things mine. I love to capture things in my mind. I constantly make the world I encounter somehow fit into the concepts I have already developed. My life is full to the brim it seems with remembered experiences, and everything new I encounter is neatly tucked into those stored memories. My days are so packed with the familiar.
This is my way of taking possession of each experience. I attempt to make familiar each item that otherwise would be a complete surprise. Plants are given names of recognition, people are recognized or put into categories, streets are becoming familiar avenues. I capture each encounter in the framework of my mind. It becomes understandable and mine to the degree I can make it fit.
What if I was able to completely turn this around! What if I became possessed by my garden every time I walked out the back door. Each time I saw the moon move from behind a cloud I would not capture and recognize it but instead reach out and be totally captured by it. The tree would not be possessed as an old familiar, but it would be the tree that absorbed and captured me. I would hand myself over rather than have it bend to me.
Everything I passed would be a new encounter without the sense of familiarity that arises every time I fit something into my life time of experiences.
That would be my future. I would wander the world without a map, no sense of where I was or what I saw. I would be amazed at each new and ‘unfamiliar’ plant I saw, every person I touch would be a ‘first’, every smell that stirred my nostrils would be ‘new’.
I would no longer be the captor gathering the world into my net of categories and familiar identities. I would be the captured. I would become prey and be taken in, absorbed. I would slowly know no longer who I was. I would no longer recognize my world. I would instead be totally absorbed by it.