quiet rivers

Katie calls “it” unproductivity and Vernon “belittles” his openness to other thoughts from other people. I’d like to say that “conflict” brings out the competitiveness in us. I use “competitiveness” here in the creative context. We require misery in order to put joy into proper perspective, and to frame one or the other, or both, in words. I recognize the inherent conflict in my wish to be outdoors while I am stuck in a confined space and in my wish to summon words, and at will, to depict configurations of thought arising from both the absence and presence of stimuli.

My inability to express happiness accordingly, and with words; as opposed to some fluency when I am miserable, or when faced with dilemma — this mirrors, if arbitrarily, my “speechlessness” when I go too deep into a “communion with nature” and am unable to employ words when seated by the computer to translate that same reflection, and my own irritation at the whole thing.

I require rhythm in what I write; a rhythm I recognize as more instinctual on my part rather than from following a universal metric template. When I fail to see that personal requirement reflected on anything I write, then I go, more often than not, into a mental tailspin that results in me foregoing writing anything at all. I hate it when I cannot express myself, at all, anymore, and in the way I want to.

Writing, posting, speaking; it is all the same to me. It’s like I am playing with a boomerang. I want to throw a thought out the farthest distance from me, see it virtually split the breeze in its passing, see it dance end-to-end between the dry smell of a falling leaf and the smell of grass at dewfall, watch it sense the changing perspectives of a world as it tries for the full potential of the trajectory generated by that one throw, and then feel it fly back to my soul and into my hands, in the same way it left me. The same, but not the same. Changed, but unchanged. Do you see it?

I can start out with the taste of a blade of grass clenched between my teeth while I sit by the lake across my house. I explore that very sense of taste and then slowly expand my other senses out. I delve into my mind and explore the nuances of that experience, and surrender my thoughts into that train-of-thought and go where it drifts. And sometimes that takes me deeper into something else, such as comparisons of life and living, and always, if it must stray into even deeper channels, and for the sake of that very meditation, I seek that whatever it might find might be the natural thing to be discovered. It does not matter how far or how short that “journey” might be, but the beautiful thing, for me, is that when such thinking leads me back to the very same blade of grass in my mouth. I might be lead, still be lead, coming back; but also gold.

Katie enjoys the stimulation of being challenged. Vernon, likewise. In my own way, I am motivated by similar “demands”. Like I said, these days being what they are, none of us find it an easy road towards originality in thought. We are vagabonds of the spirit, helpless in the face of thought already framed and discussed by wiser and far-more-enlightened thinkers. Still, the prospect of biting the “apple” ourselves is an exercise we look forward to, knowing that Life is nothing until we do our very own Living. Knowing, too, that Death will always be the stranger we will never really know, until it is time for us to meet it; be it come friend, or foe.

For now, words.

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