On Trusting your Senses or Open your Heart to See
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If people tell you, who they are, trust them, they say. Remember albeit, that you have more senses than your ears and that they are not limited to the physical ones.
You have a tongue to taste, a nose to smell, your skin to feel and eyes to observe. Yes, to observe, not to see. The seeing is done with another part of your body. When the Emperor strutted in in the nude and his lackeys were complementing him on his attire in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, everyone was told to please him and his ego in as to not make him go ballistic. Others were threatened by his position and power over them and need not be reminded, the enthralled ones were illusioning themselves about the illusion, the chess players in the court chose whatever suited their agenda best, the ones depending on the emperor's gold for mere survival bowed their head and applauded the charade, only the innocent child spoke, about what everyone was observing and no-one chose to see or dared to speak: “He is naked!” like a deus ex machina, a forgotten and discarded chess piece re-entering the game. 
One of the shadows of the panda spirit is gluttony, taking and consuming without stop and thus becoming a Hungry Ghost. If the panda dares to walk its shadow, it will find patience, balance and harmony instead.
"White Panda", white pastels, Kristin Raphaela Otti (2024, Café de L'Europe, Vienna)
In Greenlandic tales the piniartoq, the hunter, is out to hunt and collect a qussuk, a swan. He gets taken in by a plain bird, a kussuk, a witch, disguising herself by wearing what you would call “galdrar” in Northern mythology, illusions meant to deceive the eye and spark lust and greed, blinding the hunter to the truth. The script is flipped and the prey turns into the hunter who himself has unbeknownst to him become the unsuspecting and willing prey. In a Celtic tale the wren outsmarts the mighty eagle who thinks of him as the king of birds. When the birds hold a contest to find out, who could fly the highest, the eagle is sure of himself and loses in the end. The wren had taken a piggy back ride to success and left the eagle behind looking like the jester’s fool and not the king, showing him that arrogance blinds. You can find a beautiful rendition of the story read by Dr. Jane Goodall on Youtube. 
"Swanheart", white pastels, Kristin Raphaela Otti (2023, Carinthia)
In Stephen King’s “IT”, it is the children and the innocent in the bodies of grown-ups that are Pennywise the Clown's prey. They have not lost their imagination and ability to dream, but are open to the illusion used to camouflage the predator, who in the dull world of the adult part of Derry, the town the storyline of “IT” is settled in, is simply called Bob Gray, a colorless man with depth akin to a cardboard cutout. |
Dare to take a look beneath the surface or the cloak someone is wearing, you might get surprised. "Antha", coloured pencils, Kristin Raphaela Otti (2002, a character for a forum-based online role-playing game)
In his clown costume albeit, he turned into each and every child’s dream and desire and after having them lured into his arms, their worst nightmare. He fed on their emotions, capturing them in his web, leaving them in a catatonic shutdown state. In the physical world outside the realm created by Stephen King, it is the hungry ghost’s and soulthief's, the narcissist’s, modus operandi: Study the prey, feed their imagination, create a shared fantasy and then feed on their dreams and fears, suck them dry, discard them and leave them behind like a spider leaves behind the dried husk of its prey, unable to speak of the emotional and psychological rape they endured, shutdown by gossip and being provoked into a meltdown by re-traumatization. 
Sometimes following the light does not lead you to the promised land. In its negative aspect, the seadevil anglerfish is a master manipulator abusing spirituality posing as the one self-sacrificing for others, while luring them right into their abyss and his stomach. "White Seadevil Anglerfish", white pastels, Kristin Raphaela Otti (2024, Hotel, Café & Konditorei Hecher, Wolfsberg)
When my mother once asked me, if I liked a specific scent, I replied, “I do not like perfume, it makes monsters smell like roses.” Have you ever been told to trust your nose? Do it, but take other factors into account. One of my professors at university told the following story. A colleague of his was reeking. Yes, his words. Instead of getting better, it got worse little by little, day by day. As it was winter at that time, opening the windows only helped for a bit, so he and the other members of the staff chose an approach that might seem comical, but is passive aggressive at its core to solve the olfactorial problem, when they could not bear the suffering anymore. They gifted him shower gels and soap, in the hopes that he would take the hint. He did not. Alas, spring came and with it the dawn of a new time. All of a sudden, the smell was gone. There was one person who realized what it had been. The other professor had worn the same Norwegian pullover every day during winter time. It had been the pullover, soaking up the sweat for months, not the man. And yes, they could have simply asked him, instead of judging him by the nose and fear of his reaction. Things are not always, what they seem to be and at times you will not get the full story until much later, either by seeing it for yourself, while sorting your experiences, or by someone reaching out to you telling you, that they lied to you or manipulated a situation by omitting details in the hopes, you would never find out. Use all of your senses to take in, what is going on, use your mind to solve the puzzle and then open your heart to see. Kristin Raphaela Otti |
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