I know, I know…I can hear the squeal of mental brakes locked up, smell the smouldering acrid heat of belts spinning fast on cogs that are jammed and won’t move…did Charissa just say she is an introvert???

Giggle…believe it or not, I am indeed.

So, before I get to my point, I want to preface with this:

I love what my friend Dani writes of and speaks of when she mentions icebergs as a phenomena and metaphor for seeing and understanding what you see.  She points out that the vast majority of an iceberg is under the surface, regardless of what is visible on the surface.  She then has sort of developed this teaching moment for her readers, derived from her own life practice, and instructs us to understand that we must intention to see, and in that intentionality we can see what we don’t see…granting credence, respect, inferring presence and thus legitimacy to something more, something that exists and extends beyond our own way of defining it.

I think it is this intentionality of being and granting being that informs Dani’s writing and thus infuses it with such potency and presence.  And it is also what enables her to see me, something that is a literal miracle to me but the scope of which far exceeds this forum’s ability to reflect or contain.

Anyway, I am an introvert, in that all that is visible is really not that much compared to the things unseen in me, unsaid by me, and unacted on thru me.  I have tried to build in an “airlock” in me…a space thru which I try to pass all things before they exit or enter me.

I am much better at filtering the things I allow out than the things I allow in!  But I am working on that!

So this post was stimulated by the quote below:

“One of the risks of being quiet is that the other people can fill your silence with their own interpretation:

You’re bored. You’re depressed. You’re shy. You’re stuck up. You’re judgmental.

When others can’t read us, they write their own story—not always one we choose or that’s true to who we are.”

—	Sophia Dembling’s The Introvert’s Way