Re: How are you?

Thanks for asking, Carol.

In love and heartbroken. Amber and I spent Friday night and all of Saturday day together and had a really sweet time. It was sunny, and I wheeled her around the neighbourhood, stopping to sit on sun-dappled benches in a couple of parks. Then she brought up how important astrology is to her and how she didn't understand how I could be so closed-minded as to say I could never believe in it.

We stupidly got into a heated discussion about it, and she took my hatred of all superstition and pseudoscience as an insult to her, even though I said it didn't affect my feelings about her because what I love in the people I love has nothing to do with what they believe or don't believe. We parted on a sad note and both felt crappy about it for a couple of days.

I called her last night to try and straighten things out, but it just ended up being a big argument again, and she said she doesn't know how she feels about me anymore. She can't be with someone she sees as rigid and narrow-minded when it comes to magical thinking. I tried to get across that I think plenty magically myself, but that I see mysticism and science as opposite in intention and that the only way therefore to reconcile them is to see that they describe ways of viewing the world that are on two very different levels that can't be mixed.

What she loves about astrology, that it combines the mysterious connection of everything to everything else via forces beyond our understanding with the systematic categorization of down-to-earth folk psychology and prediction of worldly events, is precisely what strikes me as misguided and dangerous about it. Mysticism should be about how everything becomes the same at a deep level, and its truths can only be found within, since they can't be expressed in language. Science should be about reducing the possibilities of matter and energy on the shallower level from which we are able to talk about them, based on incontrovertible evidence and justifiable induction that is always up for reassessment. Neither one of them has anything to do with belief. And astrology is neither one nor the other.

But it's super important to her because it allowed her to figure out some things about herself that stopped her from being deeply depressed when she got out of the hospital. I got a sad goodbye in response to an I love you at the end of our long phone conversation last night, and I've felt terrible all day. I tried again tonight, in an email, to make the point that I value whatever wisdom and self-knowledge Amber has gotten out of astrology just as much as she does, but that I see them as coming from her and having nothing to do with the shaky framework that led her to them. I hope she'll listen.