The Refracted Heart… don’t ruin my rainbows

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“Keats mourned that the rainbow, which as a boy had been for him a magic thing, had lost its glory because the physicists had found it resulted merely from the refraction of the sunlight by the raindrops. Yet knowledge of its causation could not spoil the rainbow for me. I am sure that it is not given to man to be omniscient. There will always be something left to know, something to excite the imagination of the poet and those attuned to the great world in which they live.” ― Robert Frost

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Do you know what refraction is?

I sort of did and sort of didn’t… which sums up how my version of knowing works and doesn’t work.

The dictionary definition of it is (very boring. Gasp! Forsooth! For shame!):

The deflection or deviation of a wave, e.g. a beam of light,from one straight path to another when passing from one medium, e.g. air, into another.

The dictionary says other things about it, but that is all my eyes could take in of its knowledge before my mind said ‘Enough!’

My mind sometimes cries, but those tears do not reach the eyes nor do they get the chance to refract light.

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“She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry.” ― Thomas Pynchon

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It cries because of my ambitions, which it can’t achieve. My pot of gold at the end of a personal rainbow is to be a polymath (someone who has a wide range of learning – according to the dictionary). My mind consistently ruins this rainbow. I have dyslexia, a condition of brain wiring which causes words, numbers, knowledge, the world, to get refracted once the wave hits my brain.

However the achievement of my ambition, the realisation of my ideal, does not really matter. The heart of the matter, of matter, is the quest to ride the rainbow… the pot of gold at the end is not as valuable to me as the journey to reach it, but I don’t really ever want to reach it. My heart loves the journey more than the journey’s end.

I enjoy, wholeheartedly, trying to cram my mind with information, then turn that information into knowledge, then transmute that knowledge into knowing… I know that my mind will not retain most of that which I endeavour to cram into it. I used to mourn this loss, but now I see it as an opportunity to re-learn, and perhaps through re-learning I will notice something new which I missed before. Learning is always an adventure, which fills my heart with enthusiasm and excitement.

I recall, many decades ago, being given an opportunity to graduate early. To do so I would have to go to cramming school. To me this sounded exciting, my heart expanded, my mind cringed a little but was inspired by my heart to embrace that which made it reluctant. To those who had power over me, my education, and my journey through life, this sounded like… something which they declined. The wave hit them and refracted in a way which was not the way that it refracted through me. The wave seldom hit them the way it hit me, and our refractions were always going off in different directions.

I rued that day and decision for many years… the wave of my possible future had been deviated in a manner which mattered to me and did not seem to matter at all to those who had deviated it. My beam of being had been refracted through someone else, and I was uncertain if I liked the result.

But waves keep moving, refracting, moving on from their refractions in to new refractions… and so did I. Eventually. Realising that memories refract the past into the present, which causes the future to appear distorted.

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“Beneath the skin, there is fear. Pain. Remorse. Yearning. Desire. A fierce longing for power. All of this. We are joined. It is as if we live in the center of a great storm. Around us the world of the realms revolves like a giant kaleidoscope, images refracted again and again. So many worlds! So much to know.” ― Libba Bray

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And so it goes. At times beautiful, at times ugly, seen and unseen, too painful to view yet too compelling to cause the eyes to avert… at times… something in between which offers a new perspective. And so it goes.