The Strange Places on the Boarderland.

[peter]

Did I once read somewhere that you are more likely to see a unicorn at 3am that at any other time of day or night? Well, maybe, maybe not (on both whether I read it and whether the contention is true) but there's no getting away from it; things are different in the dead of night than in the for light of day.

I once did a job as a night security guard in a Mercedes garage way out in the sticks, and part of my duties was to do an hourly premises perimeter walk, out in the dark with just a powerful torch for illumination. The place, perfectly normal during the day, at night became.... I don't know......odd. It just wasn't the same. Cold and rational as you might be, at this time things that seemed silly and irrational during the day became almost feasable.

On another occasion (and maybe others might have experienced this one) I was walking in a wood, a very beautiful place, and wandered out a bit further and a bit later than I intended. Almost of an instant the daylight began to fade, just a little you understand, and immediately and without warning the place, that moments before had been relaxing and friendly, took on a sinister aspect that was deeply unnerving. It was just like, I wasn't meant to be there and it was with no small relief that I reached my parked car and security returned.

Now I know that from the distance of your armchair, it will be easy to pour cold water on this stuff. "That Peter must be of a nervous disposition - he just got into a blue funk" you'll say, but I once knew an old feller, tough as nails who was into mountains. In fact at the end of the second world war, on demobbing from the army he went on his own into the Hindu Kush and did some climbing in the Himalaya. He said to me, in all seriousness "Things are strange when you get high up in the mountains. Not the same as down below; odd things happen." I've heard from another climber about an illusory phenomena where above the snowline, under certain and very rare circumstances, you will see yourself walking towards you. Not the same certainly as my stories, but the point is that there are places in this world, rarely experienced and poorly understood, where briefly the boarders between the rational workaday world and - something other, seem to become frayed and cold headed rationalist as you may be, you find yourself in a place where normal rules seem somehow akilter. The strange places on the boarderland.

[Skyweir]

Humans are emotive creatures, with a penchant for superstition and possessing a significant imagination.

The difference between daylight and dim light is light intensity .. the trees remain in their place ... perhaps nocturnal predators come out to feed. You should be cautious to such changing conditions.

Beyond that ... Im unconvinced that anything other worldly is going on

[Avatar]

Part of it is also probably that your brain automatically fills in a lot of what you see, which means it's affected by your feelings and perceptions.

If you whip your head from left to right with your eyes open, your eye's actually shut down..your brain just projects what you think you see in the process, based on what you saw before you did it.

--A

[Vraith]

I've probably said before something like "I'd be a pure mystical/spiritual crap is crap/illusion/delusion except for a few things..."

Personal, direct, happened to me ones, for instance:
A couple of inexplicable [for now] but totally replicable/teachable from martial arts.

As a teen I had quite a few, and in later years several, dreams that literally, exactly, came true---and for a couple of them, I have PROOF. I both wrote them down AND told a friend of mine about them, cuz he was IN the dream, and later, present when they happened.

So I dismiss crazy shit [like in something else you mentioned elsewhere---people jumping from mountain to mountain]...but not smaller things, not the entirety of the odd.

Borderlands are a common thing in the strange, though---and there are good psycho/physical reasons. Borders challenge the systems.
Like dusk/dawn...besides the obvious psychological time/beginning/ending things, PHYSICALLY the eye is in a challenging state---color vs. black and white, rod vs. cones, peripheral vs. center, lit and defined vs. dim and diffuse.

Anyway, welcome and goodbye to my last public Watch post.

[Lazy Luke]

I like the idea of, "The Golden Path". A place briefly glimpsed during mid to late October, when the trees have shed half their leaves - where both lands of summer and winter overlap.
Like Leto II Atreides, I too believe it to be humanities only chance of survival.

[peter]

Let me make it clear - I'm not suggesting here the existence of 'other realms' (cue sooky music) in this post. I'm more interested in the place your mind takes you to in such situations....... and that I'm thinking, is perhaps the place where the 'reality' of this exists. The strange places of the boarderland are places of the mind - but no less real because of this.

(V - don't make pronouncements about this being your last public post, or that being the other.......

You make chains for yourself - unnecessary ones. Drift in to the Watch, drift out. Post where you are inspired to, forget the rest. Respect.)

[Savor Dam]

For the parenthetical portion:


Just as some interpret the central curve of the Amazon logo as a boomerang symbolizing separated customers and employees inexorably returning to the fold, may Watchers who choose to take a break always feel that they can come back at any time and resume their place in this community.

[peter]

Oddly enough, now I think on it, the strange places exist not only at the macro level, but also down at the level of quanta. What other way to describe the weird shenanigans of quantum theory, where particles can instantly have 'knowledge' of the conditions of their partner particles, be separated as they may by light years of distance. I was dehorning cattle on one occasion on a farm in Cornwall and as I cut the skin around the base, then sawed off the bone hard horn, the farmer was picking up the sawn off pieces with their attached ring of skin and stringing them up on nails driven into the walls of a nearby cattle house to dry in the sun.

I asked him why he did not simply discard the sawn off remnants and the old man said that if the pieces were left to rot, the wounds on the cattle would fester and go bad. If however the discards were dried in the sun, the wounds on the animals would likewise dry and heal in a healthy way. This 'sympathy from a distance' was well known in the first world war, when people were very often very careful about how the discarded bandages and the like were handled following dressing changes, and the old farmers superstitions were clearly a throwback to such beliefs. This in a strange way is not a million miles away from the practice of Voodoo in which the filched cut-offs from a person's body - hair and nail trimmings - were incorporated into the 'dolls' on which the 'magic' was performed. Odd that a practice found in the small communities of tribal Africa should have found it's counterpart on the farms of Cornwall, separated by both time and distance, but essentially the same nevertheless.

(NB. The practice of dehorning described above was carried out under local anesthesia and while the cattle did not much like it (particularly the cauterizing process which produced much smoke) they were not subjected to any more pain than say we are when undergoing a tooth extraction. If the process was not carried out, then the cattle would inflict sometimes terrible wounds on each other, such as eyes being gouged out. The process should have been done when the cattle were calves, in fact very short after birth when it is known as disbudding rather than dehorning, but often the cattle were out at pasture or were not available for other reasons.)

[Skyweir]

Yeah its all just superstition isnt it.

Its not so different believing in god or gods plural is it. Believers believe god intervenes in their lives .. through prayer and miracles ... blessing them with good harvests.

All the positive things that from then on occurring in their lives they ascribe to god and his, her or its goodness but any negative thing occurring in their lives are not mentioned or ascribe to the devil and evilness.

Theres nowt so strange as folk

Humans have a tendency to grasp that which makes us feel more than mortal.. because humans are unique as life forms ... so we must be destined for more than a mortal life.

Like the hanging of the horns ... it safeguards the cattles healing but dismisses the one or two that may not heal.



Its irrational and not logic based.

[peter]

Are the two things necessarily the same Sky?

[Skyweir]

Not sure which two things you refer to

But in general terms they are similar approaches ... at least as similar as African voodoo expressions and Anglo pagan practices re the dehorning practices.

Its all belief ... what we as humans want to believe.

Is there logic pathways surrounding such beliefs? In some cases yes .. and what those logic pathways show us is there are scientific reasons things occur.

Washings and anointings are an old practice for when people got sick. It was a faith based practice .. that sometimes assisted the sick. Those with faith believed in gods power being released through these ordinances. However at a time when personal hygiene wasnt all that studious .. it was a positive practice. Sometimes reaping evident benefit ... or those anointed had stronger immune systems.

Like some believed that sage was a purifier .. and some religions in the early days of the churches used to waft burning bundles of sage.

Sage I believe is a natural disinfectant .. and burning sage does eliminate airborne germs.

I dont know ... but I do think we ascribe divine and miraculous qualities to such practices ... when for some if not many ... there are logical explanations for their benefit and practice.

Like the strangeness of some places ... Id suspect if we unpacked the alleged strangenesses we could identify logical and rational reasons for each and every one.

But wheres the fun in that?

[Avatar]

Sympathetic magic is well established in the history of many cultures. But as we know, correlation is not causation.

--A