Sylvia's Journal

All through the night the verb, image and action, of ‘snaking’ twirled through my busy mind. First there was the snaking as in ‘snaking across borders and boundaries’ that was probably a result of watching the TV program on India before going to bed (the borders part). Progress of the journey was presented as a red line snaking across a map of the subcontinent.

Then there was the snaking across boundaries that my fellow Quaker Ken did by attending a (conservative) Quaker church meeting in Washington State and stumbling on territory if not hostile to then at least uncomfortable with the presence of a gay man in their midst. His recounting of this experience led to a fascinating conversation at a committee meeting last night about engaging with the unknown ‘other.’ The Bulgarian critic Tzvetan Todorov once said: ‘The first spontaneous reaction to a stranger is to imagine him as inferior, since he is different from us.’ Ken’s encounter proved, once again, the power of conversation to open the gates between two states (of being) and seeing each other’s humanity.

But there was also the snaking that electricians, chimney sweeps and plumbers do by using a long object to get through narrow passageways that humans cannot negotiate. This sort of snaking is about unclogging and/or (re)connecting something to itself. I can’t help but think that this action has something to do with the X-ray and ultrasound that will be taken later today to find out what this lump is all about. Something is clogged inside me, making me hold my breath right now.