From the inside, from the outside. // Caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror during yoga today. (The mirror is usually covered for yoga, this was another dis-ordering from the cats' wild night.) After years of not seeing, a small shock (what is that, my leg?) to see from the outside what I have lived, or studied, or gotten comfortable with, for a long time, from the inside.
Related. The other day I stumbled on wikipedia entries for Kejawen and Kapitayan, Javanese folk spiritual lineages (I wouldn’t call them religions) that have syncretized with Islam (and Buddhism and Hinduism, etc.). Not exactly what I live with, and our community just calls it Islam, but this gives an outside perspective on… whatever I write about when I write about Islam in Java (or among Javanese people elsewhere, like in Bali).
Again, from an outside perspective. What I “do” is another syncretization, with my own weird and twisted roots in ancient Greek, Abrahamic, European pagan, American, (etc.), mythologies, ontologies, theologies. There is a vast (and global) landscape to explore beyond the cultural limits of Enlightenment European thought, which believes itself to have a monopoly on the logos. But this kind of “exploring” is… not possible “from the outside”. (And neither is “the logos”.)
Anyway. I fixed the curtain on the mirror, so it shouldn’t happen again. But you never know with cats,