I've been thinking about the gifts and challenges of being "too sensitive". Most of the men, and some of the women, I have crossed paths with over the years have found my sensitivity exasperating. To the extent to which it often manifested in being sensitive to personal slights, or responding poorly to comments that people said were jokes (but didn't sound like jokes to me) -- or whatever -- I agree that sensitivity had its downside, for me and for relating to the people around me. On the plus side, it made it possible for me to sing on key, to sightread challenging choral music, to harmonize with music I had never heard before, to paint realistic paintings of fruit and do color mixing in oils. It has made it possible for me to express myself in words in ways that many people cannot. So at 66, on balance, I would never want to be less sensitive, or medicated "against" this aspect of my makeup.
Still, it is becoming clear to me that in this 2022 rebirth time, my sensitivity to assaults on the divine feminine has increased significantly. Yesterday was a good illustration of this.
Sometimes I take the city bus "up to the mall" area. (It is literally an uphill battle here!) When you don't own a car, every week or two you have to take the bus out to one of the more outlying areas just to get a change of scenery. You need to escape the limiting confines of downtown. However, I don't like malls and retail strips; ultimately, I just don't find them beautiful.
I went into one of the enormous supermarkets, just for a few things, and almost swooned. (By definition, that Victorian-sounding condition can be brought on by positive or negative situations, but for me it almost always occurs when I am negatively overwhelmed.) It hit as I walked through the bakery aisle. There must have been many hundreds of loaves of bread (commercial, not store-baked) on the shelf. It was just too much to think about. I mean, is all this bread being sold and eaten? Is the remainder getting to the local food shelf? Does it seriously only cost around $4.00 to make, package, and ship each of these loaves? Where do all the plastic container bags end up? From the moment these thoughts hit me, I was completely freaked out. Each aisle was stuffed to the gills with thousands of bottles of soda, hundreds upon hundreds of cake mixes and cans of tuna and bottles of condiments. The amount of plastic waste generated by this one store, alone, is almost unthinkable, even if some waste is eventually recycled. Add to that the amount of food that must have to be discarded, other packaging, and artificial sweeteners, scents, and flavorings...I could barely breathe once I left the store. Nothing in the place seemed to reflect Nature, the Goddess. Her truly natural ingredients have been twisted into so many knots, I doubt She can recognize them.
Next door, an old big box store has closed and a new one has taken its place. The redecoration is quite swank, and I have no doubt that the home furnishings within are of good quality. But I will never go in there, simply because when you have no home, you don't have a place to furnish. Even if I turned on a dime tomorrow and started to believe in our paradigm, and got full-time work in some modestly lucrative milieu, the fact is that at this late date, I still could never afford a house in this lifetime. It is painful simply to look at some of these places, much less to go in them, they are so far out of reach.
Lastly, a small stretch of the strip, which I swear has been for sale since back in the 1990's when I first lived here, seems finally to have been sold. Half a dozen bulldozers, graders, and other huge pieces of equipment were completely changing the 2 or 3 acres of landscape. I literally let out a little cry; I could feel the pain of the earth being dug into and altered without Nature's permission. It felt like an attack on my own body.
It's like, the numbness of over six decades of living in this consumerist culture has finally worn off. I feel the pain, the inequity, the inherent conflict of it all, and as hard as it is, I don't want to return to numbness. For me, it's not about fighting these trends or self-medicating. It's about walking through and understanding my ultrasensitivity in this area, writing honestly, and aligning ever more with the divine feminine. I will never again call it "oversensitivity", because that's a negative judgment. "Ultrasensitivity" simply means, I have sensitivity in abundance for some good reason. It is one of my divine gifts, not a curse.
