some words of @Troodon (starting here: https://occult.camp/@Troodon/99304786251390079, though this link probably won't work for most folks) got me to remember an end-of-work-day insight from a couple days ago
one thing that I like about working the night shift, although it's perhaps a mixed blessing, is that some combination of the fatigue and being up at hours I really shouldn't be awake at and other factors seems to sensitize me to spiritual insights, even spiritual revelations (like the Frisk thing)
I'm getting off my point
I was walking to the bus stop and reflecting on when, decades ago, I first read these words in Ursula LeGuin's "The Tombs of Atuan"
“What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.”
the words resounded with me as few words had ever done up to that point in my sheltered life, and I remember putting them in my .sig block on Usenet for a while
(remember .sig blocks? oh, those were the days)
but could I _honestly_ have said, at that time, that I had the faintest idea what the words MEANT? I felt profoundly stirred, but did I understand the feeling?
I know now that the answer is no, I had no real idea.
hasn't been until the last year or so that I've even begun to understand what LeGuin was saying
another artist put it another way
🎵 don't let them break you
don't let them tell you who you are
doesn't matter where you come from, you'll always have a floor to sleep on
and you have your bamboo bones
nervous energy
blind ambition
skin of your teeth
push back, push back, push back
with every word and every breath
what god doesn't give to you
you've got to go and get for yourself 🎵
that was Laura Jane Grace of "Against Me!", in her song "Bamboo Bones" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQPjEQV-Aek)
by the time I heard _that_ for the first time I was understanding more, although I still was months away from the crucial revelation, when I was finally prepared to throw off completely the mass of social conditioning that I'd been given with the label [deadname] on it
I could understand LJG better than I understood LeGuin, if not necessarily how to act on the words
when I read "The Tombs of Atuan" I was at one of the lowest points in my life, crushed back into the cell I'd started life in, back home with my parents in my home town like Mae Borowski only with less social support and understanding than even _she_ had (thought lesser problems as well)
LeGuin gave me a glimpse of something else, but I didn't understand it, much less what I was supposed to do about it. does that mean the revelation was useless? _meaningless_, even?
obviously I don't think so _now_. the moment of _Sehnsucht_ or "Joy" that I experienced upon reading those words in "The Tombs of Atuan" ended up making sense in context, becoming a building block for later insight and revelation. it was what @kel calls a "shiny", a treasure added to my mental store that would eventually become useful, like the random objects you get in games whose true purpose does not become clear for many hours or days or weeks (at the rate I play through games)
@kara SHINIES