Most obvious

I truly feel thankful for much of the good in the world.

So I call my dog to take a pee. I shouldn't be letting her pee in front of the house, but its cold and I'm lazy.

I sit on the ottoman waiting for her to finish, in the dark and with my laptop.

I become aware of her after awhile not thinking about her. I immediately whistle, long and with a particular melody that she knows. Three times, still no response. Until I hear a movement - a shaking - and the sound grows and the thought of her coming closer, listening to me, following the sounds that she hears - beckoning her overlord, the one to her who is similar to himself and the universe.

The sound is now quite crystal clear and she passes through the doorway. Beautiful creature. Beautiful black coat, so shiny from all the fish in her food. Floppy ears, head always drawn downwards towards the smells of the world. Teeter tottering, back and forth, wobbling in, and I can't help but say "ohh, you're so cute!" Intonation on the 'cuuuutteee' and "I'm going to eat you!" as I lay millions of kisses on her head, her eyelids and her cheeks.

What the hell draws me to do this? I feel like I love this feeling so much because I've suffered so badly.

It's not so much about Maggy, than about me my relationship to the world.

In suffering, deep, existential, life-crisis, nervous breakdown type of sense, you are forced into an encounter with a horrific, deeply painful experience of reality. Burning nerves, adrenaline flowing, wantonly, cursing my mental insides with it's iron-clad venom. A tremendous anxiety about the next moment, the next thought to torture my mind. Senses fogged, it seems, the world loses some of the lively quality that it would have - in a healthy mind - being felt in a state of related-meaningness.

There's breaks in cognition. Interruptions in self-state streams. "Gaps", where affect and positive feeling was. Now just negativity, filtering into perception, disturbing feeling states, growing pictures of a distorted, disheveled reality. Shame is the only word that comes to mind.

My world is shame in such states. When you're faced with such a world, and you desperately, eagerly, obsessively want to get better - you dig deeeep, and deeeeper, not willingly, but of necessity, as a fundamental matter of survival, you find yourself ably doing it.

Maybe it's just me, but I think for everyone there is an implicit awareness of ones self in all it's different ways of being. He's a 'weaver', taking multitudes of formations and stitching them into a deeply felt sense of being 'one', yet the dynamics of self are determined by the configurating multiples. Its a fundamental paradox of human being: were controlled by versions of our perceptions, and ,since these perceptions are primed into being by contextual references, the ways of being have a life of their own. We 'enact' and become, not quite willingly, but profoundly unknowingly.

The singularity and pointedness of self-awareness is akin to the insertion of a ray into the 'worlds of self', where consciousness can peer and analyze - but to nevertheless remain subtly influenced by the dynamic activity of the self-state. Staying clear and finding that "consciousness". They're both alike. Love, Awe, Compassion..They are moments of existential coherence. The world makes sense - it 'hit's you with meaning, and you default to a time before your birth. Something, flowing around and within you, at times far because of lifes vicissitudes and at other times closer, perceptible. It can feel I imagine, like the time in the womb. Those images occur to me, strongly, and the feeling of orange, of darkness and wetness, of a floating sensation with pressure sounds bubbling to my ears. Eyes closed. Relaxing, forming, growing, becoming with each moment something more, through the magic and mystery of ontogenesis, chemical reactions, and in their reacting they build a living being.

The thing is a wonder.

I am in love with the Other. This world. This life. This experience. The trials and the discovery of inner resources against deeply terrifying sights and sounds, thoughts and feelings, affects. Affects, charging into your skull, triggering electric shocks, high voltages, blanking of reality with each action potential. Switched. On - then off. The most horrifying bodily experience imaginable. Psychological stress unleashing torrents of stress on the body. Adrenaline, cortisol, devastating the nervous system.

I see much more than Maggy. I see the world she represents, presented to me, at this moment, in a loving, bubbly, ignorant - wobbly - way. Sauntering towards me, making me love her - because I see, so strongly and keenly, the power I wield over her. Her mind. Her experience. A little, smaller portion of reality than myself, but a living life, perceiving, exciting, exploring, fearing, sleeping, dreaming.

I don't hope for anything more than these experiences. If that is all life can give me - if that is all, and nothing more to come - beautiful. Fine. I will bask in this heaven on earth, privy to the secret of the mystery of being. The blessedness of not-knowing, and settling there, while yet, paradoxically, knowing something more than a simple just not knowing.

In being so hurt, there's just a little, brilliantly beautiful child within me - as me - the kernel to the husk of my adult face. My attention attends to him: I love him? What a bizarre scenario! The witness I am and the Self I become.

It is in suffering that this distinction becomes most obvious.