Intuition

 I can't help but feel that I'm sitting on a veritable treasure trove of instinctive information whilst living here without understanding the language. Though I am, more quickly than I imagined, beginning to understand some context of what people are chatting about and individual words are emerging, my brain is not yet fast enough to glue each one into its proper sentence-forming place. I interpret a conversation as a general haze of words, facial expressions, and body language instead of a structured interaction. 

In Italy, people talk with their hands in a way that could be interpreted to me, as an American, as marginally hostile. It isn't always clear to me if the arm-flailing dance playing out on the sidewalk is friendly or confrontational. My confusion lasts all the way up until the two hastily depart. I stand bewildered as each party waves off the other as he jumps in his car, then honks and waves as he departs. What the hell just happened?

And so my perception can only be reduced to another type of interpretation. To me it is a sixth sense, and one that I can't say has ever been so clearly available to me in all of my years yet so incredibly hard to describe. The only thing I can properly compare it to is trust, but not an earned trust. And certainly not a trust built on lingual or bodily communication. It is almost, so very simply, the inclusion or exclusion of proximal fear. 

I think what both the scientific and spiritual communities would call this is intuition, but my body cringes at the word. To me it sounds like a word that has been warped through the ages in the direction of eliminating the autonomy of conscious reasoning for women. One that makes us question whether what we see, hear, taste, or smell has no relevance to what is actually being presented to us by men. Do we trust our intuition? Or do we trust the actual thing that the person in front of us is so clearly performing to our physical senses?

There's no way only one direction can be the right direction, I guess. And I guess the entire point of this blog is that this is the first time I've felt the intuition portion of my senses in such a real and defining way. It is opening up, for me, an entirely new view of the world I live in and its fucking rad. I also think I'm going to trust it for a bit and see what happens. The worst I could end up as is murdered in a ditch in the most beautiful place I've ever seen.


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