Day 81

I was telling the man with the cap—the one who lives in the ceiling—that it’s been hard to keep track of myself, lately. He said keeping track of a self is pretty simple, that the chief object of the whole thing is to be brightly, and to help brighten others’ being, too, which I thought was a lovely thing to say.

I’ve been enjoying his company lately.

The lady bee put it differently. In the hive, she said, they have a saying: Dirty feet do ne’er repeat. I’m not sure I understand the nuance of it, but she said it basically means no two bees ever bring back the same collection of pollen—everyone’s contribution is unique and valuable, and it doesn’t make sense to judge a bee by his feet when they’re clean, because clean feet don’t offer anything of value. (Apparently bees pay a lot of attention to each other’s feet, which makes sense because they talk by dancing.) So it’s like us saying to judge people by their actions. You look at the pollen they bring back, not the shape of their feet.

This was all in regard to my observation that isolation makes it hard to maintain an identity, since we’re used to defining ourselves in relation or resistance to other people. Pretty soon everybody in the ECCV was caught up in a debate about whether a pure self, absent external comparison, could have an identity at all. One of the Forest Sprites said he thought that’s what God’s experience was like before she made all the different trees to be manifest in. It was a heady conversation, especially since I was trying to work at the time.

The HM says I might be spending too much time out there by myself. I keep saying she needs to come out and meet the rest of them.

That just makes her look at me all concerned. I hate to see her that way. I’m thinking I should put up some wood paneling in her studio, so she can have company like I do.