Metaphoric tentacles

“My husband is a tiger.”  Do we live in some-such metaphor as we attempt our conversations? I’m speaking of an apprehending process – extending ourselves by means of a metaphoric “tentacle” – through which we think and act as we communicate with other people.

They flavor our attempts at communication in our understandings and communications. Metaphors such as, “Our company shelters us like a big oak tree,” or “I’m trying to give you a gift,” or “I see no future with you,” may be hints at the deep symbols with which we identify and empathize.

What I think is how I convey: the truths I can tell and hear, the life changes I can experience, the confessions, forgivenesses, leaps and stomps I can acknowledge. Upon our phrasings we try-out our experiences, extend a translation toward the strange and the stranger, and affirm familiar knowledge.

Living inside someone’s unfamiliar metaphor can be fantastic, terrifying, exotic, and morally strange. How may we meet one another across our many metaphoric diversities? Perhaps only by the kind of attention in our conversations that Simone Weil characterized as “absurd love in the public realm.”