In the land of the blind...

Whatever I observe, whatever I experience, I embrace. There is nothing that is unworthy of acceptance. There is nothing taken on 'faith'. There is nothing that I cannot endure. I am capable of enjoying the moment, of somehow enduring what others find unendurable by finding something pleasant in it. I can smile with equanimity and say that I never did mind the little things, and mean it. Does that make me a masochist? A realist? A hedonist? A sinner?

Whatever it makes me, I cannot evade the awareness that I sometimes make others uncomfortable with my sensory perceptions of reality. Why the sensual makes people so uncomfortable, I do not know. I do not understand. Do I need to change? Can I change? All I know of the world is what I have experienced, and I experience it through my senses. My senses are acute, not corrupt. How can I deaden them, except to retreat into myself, into the bubble-world of the life of the mind? And with my vivid, multi-sensory imagination, would retreat make me any less a sensual, pleasure-centric creature?

What is so wrong with being aware of the world, with enjoying it? What is wrong with being sensitive to shades of colour, to the subtlty of sounds like the patter of water, to the touch of someone's hand on my skin? What is wrong with swooning over my first bite into a ripe nectarine? Why is it wrong that I enjoy scents that others cannot smell? Why am I odd because I am transfixed by the flow of water from a bamboo pole, its drip into a granite bowl? It seems such a metaphor for life, that fountain, in a way that I cannot express in words. It simply is. Why don't others see/hear/taste/feel/smell it?

I do not know. I am passionately interested in knowing, in understanding why my being so sensually aware threatens others, why it makes me feel like a one-eyed man in the land of the blind, waiting to be stoned to death.