White Azaleas, by Julia
While preparing a post for PEGASUS I received a Comment from Dr. Alistair on my post ”Reflections”, December 16.
That reminded me of one of my earliest memories. From the day my first two years of golden baby curls were lopped off (to the accompaniment of my mother’s tears) until my family moved from St. Augustine when I was in First Grade, I was taken to Caruso’s Barber Shop on St. George Street for haircuts.
When seated and raised up on the barber’s chair I faced a wall that was one huge, long mirror. Behind me, the wall was also a mirror. The result was that I could see not only my reflection in the mirror in front of me, but also that reflection reflected by the mirror behind me back to the mirror in front of me, which reflection was in turn reflected to the rear mirror, which returned it (containing all the previous reflections) to the mirror in front of me – and so on in an endless ping pong game of light, scores of reflections of the same thing, smaller and smaller, in a tunnel to infinity.
I hope I’ve explained that so that if anyone hasn’t experienced it he or she can visualize it.
I can’t attach a cosmic or spiritual meaning to what I saw in Caruso’s Barber Shop any more than I can to the reflections that surround and fascinate me today, but for some reason the memory evokes a sense of significance.
When I try to think of all the other memories I have of reflections, the list swiftly grows beyond management, and so I’ll leave you to make your own list. But among all my memories of reflections, none has a higher place than the infinite diminishing mirror images in Mr. Caruso’s shop.
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Tomorrow will be 1m 8s longer than today.
Yellow Kolanchoe, by Julia
To me, those type of reflections represent eternal life . . . it's a clue from the Creator.
ReplyDeleteVictor
Anonymous, thank you. The idea of reincarnation passed through my mind as I thought about the mirrors. I suspect that my crude conceptions of reincarnation and of "afterlife" are gross simplifications of the real complexity of "eternal life".
ReplyDeleteall of our perceptions are spiritual. how can they not be?
ReplyDeleteHmmmm.....
ReplyDeleteI shall reflect on this post.
Dr. Alistair, I agree with you because I believe that the "stuff" from which all arises is spiritual.
ReplyDeleteI'm now being tantalized by the challenge to define -- for purposes of my blog at any rate -- words like "spiritual", "spirit", and "prayer".
Rob, very good! Just don't reflect so brightly on this post that you burn it up.
ReplyDeletei just see it all as one thing. spirit. our "aliveness." we are talking to ourselves (prayer) which further generates more stuff of spirit.
ReplyDeletealan watts said that we spend our time pulling things into little pieces, for some reason, and so become convinced that things are seperate when we`ve managed to name the pieces......
then in time of crisis when we need to "pull ourselves together" we have to begin to figure out where everything came from, so that we can begin to feel better.
This type of reflection will boost my imagination and look forward to the future, so I can get closer to each smaller reflections far away from me.
ReplyDeleteThank you very much for your comment in my blog. You're a great writer. Hope to learn a lot from you.
English is not my native, excuse me for the grammar mistakes. :)
Pink Ginger, you are very kind. Thank you so much for looking at my blog! When I first found your beautiful blog I realized that English was probably not your first language, but I thought that you wrote in English extremely well.
ReplyDeleteIf you feel like posting comments, please do, and don't worry about the language. You are quite fluent in English.
Fleming, I appreciate your kindness and encouragement. You're a writer, must be disappointed to see grammar mistakes. :)
ReplyDeleteAm Chinese educated, still learning English everyday, sometime sleep with dictionary.
It takes lots of courage to start a blog in English with my limited vocab, but I can learn from a mistakes.
I found many witty stuff in your blog. It will be nice if we can link to each other.
Thank you, lovely Pink Ginger. I will put a link on PEGASUS.
ReplyDeleteYou are a good writer yourself.
Dr. Alistair, I enjoyed your comment. "Aliveness" seems a good word to associate with "spirit". I was introduced to the word "Isness" (rather awkward?) in that connection. I've recently seen "consciousness" used as a synonym for spirit or Source, as in "All is Consciousness."
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