By Alyson Hallett


You 

I knew from the moment I saw you. 
Told no-one, told only myself 
and then silently. Buried your face 
in the beaten tundra of my heart. 
All seeds start in darkness, 
need secrecy to discover what they're carrying, 
what they contain. Love spoke 
a language I couldn't spell because it spelled 
me: I was love's lips and tongue and servant. 
The seed conspires with unseen things 
and even if we watched through the sides 
of a transparent pot 
we still wouldn't grasp the magic 
of those first roots or shoots. Equally, 
I never understood how you came 
out of the wastelands and into my home. 
If I think of the seed, then I'd say 
our meeting was conceived long ago. 
It was etched into a parabola of snow. 
It was sand in a camel's hoof. 
It was in the scent of a badger 
when my great-grandmother 
walked home one moon-lit evening. 
The seed of our meeting had been evolving 
for centuries: when you knocked on the door 
I opened my soul and said come in.

"Point, Line and Plane. 
The point is the first thing that can be done. It is without dimension and is not in space. Without an inside or an outside, the point is the source for all that follows. It is represented as a small circular dot. 
The first dimension, the line, comes into being as the One emerges into two principles, active and passive. The point chooses somewhere 'outside' of itself, a direction. Separation has occurred and the line comes into being. A line has no thickness, and it is sometimes said that a line has no end.
Three 'ways' now became apparent.

1. With one end of the line stationary, or passive, the other is free to rotate and describe a circle, representing heaven.
2. The active point can move to a third position equidistant from the other two thus describing an equilateral triangle.
3. The line can produce another which moves away until distance are equal to form a square, representing Earth."

 From Sacred Geometry by Miranda Lundy - found by Kristina.

If the amygdala is constantly monitoring something as subtle as changes in the facial expressions of others, then it can play a pivotal role in the individual differences we see in how reactive some people  are to the social signals of others compared to their peers. The implications of this for healthy interpersonal interactions are enormous. For example, if amygdala reactions were overly sensitive to the facial reactions of others, one might take a simple facial movement of a friend, one that was not intended to convey disapproval, as a certain slight.

Aberrant amygdala reactions could play a part in exacerbating a host of psychopathologies. Indeed, numerous studies have identified abnormal amygdala responses to facial expressions across a variety of psychopathologies involving emotional dysfunction such as major depression, anxiety disorders, phobias, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and autism. More importantly, amygdala responses to facial expressions have been used to predict treatment outcomes in both depression and generalized anxiety disorder with lower pretreatment levels of amygdala response predicting better treatment outcomes.

Read more: Face to Face with the Emotional Brain - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences