Everyone is a beginner

            “In the beginning everyone is a beginner.  That’s the first thing.  Some think the conventions of time can save you if you get a handle on the arm of the clock.  You only need that if you’re talking the thin kind of time that rushes past you so quickly that you feel you might go over the rapids.   That thin time really slides but of course it’s no good.  No good at all.  And besides, now people just get swept away.  Now there’s not even the little hand to grab hold of.  Digital  changed all that.  Now they’re just doing some serious numbers crunching.  Try to survive that.” 

            “First we got turned around chasing the spheres in the sky.  Then from the sun and moon going through all their phases like the stilted, speedy rhythm of time lapse photography folks got dizzy. They had to sit down till the swirling settled.  Something had to be done.  Someone called for organization”

            “Too bad everybody forgot about the options we had.  Now so many are just rushing down the road hoping boulders don’t drop a dime on them.  Hoping it ain’t their time yet.   Thin time, what’s known as linear time tends to pull us into pieces.  We become fragmented and even separated from our own experiences.  Our conception of time is now a pale, melted Dali watch.  There are deeper layers of time, richer than this surface tick tock telling of events.  Do not deny the shadows.  The spaces between.”

Conversations with Nic available at  http://amzn.to/14jUNUs

 the wild blue is available at http://amzn.to/13RKQ2i

the web, the holograph and the point you're at right now

In some way my neural network has started the work of Spider woman in stretching its web and integrating all aspects of my experiences to build a home.  So no matter where I am on the web, no matter what intersection or triangle the center has been set and strengthened.  But the thing is, I can’t predict where I will be on the web either.  I don’t know if this is good or bad.  But this is the way it is with webs and triangles.  As much as I want to be able to predict the structure of my life  I realize that it can’t be.  I can try to set the conditions but I can’t predict what will become of me in my becoming.  That would be impossible.  I would prefer that but then I suppose it could be tiresome to have everything so ordered and predictable.   Never said I chose the road.  It’s more like the road chose me.  It’s as if it forms me in time with it’s thickening geometry.
I think of my neural network as being like Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes.  All points are equally strong and set in their triangular units.  The units that make up the web are a parcel and symbolic language;  a solid syntax of building that belies the delicate appearance of the structure.  If I fall apart, in some way, the structure will be there.  The framework is always more solid than the item, especially if it’s an organic “item.”  Bummer.  But true enough.

I think of Mark Rothko and his rectangles of color.  I thought of the abstract rectangles and his death and couldn’t fathom the depths he must have traveled to bring one color into relationship with the other on the canvas.  Yet his simple canvases speak volumes.  Ceremonial at times, their force pulls me back to something ancient.  They’re like eyes through to another way of knowing.  When I look at them I am drawn into a deeper place within myself and I wonder what went into his hands.

I know that we can’t all survive our trip.  It seems that everything that informs us, changes us.   A condition of change is always an end to something or some state.  It’s not necessarily a definitive end that’s why we can use the word transformation.  There is always the residue of endings residing on the edge of beginnings.  If we dive off into the open seas we will change.  We will be seized by a new element and within this watery world everything is possible.  But we swim through the natal waters of our world and take residence in the element that gave birth to all that resides on land.  And our neural net holds us to what is true within us during this time.

*Conversations with Nic available at  http://amzn.to/14jUNUs
*The wild blue - a prose poem about the movement from grief to resilience that is about personal loss but also how we are connected to our world and how our lives are folded back into the world again after we lose people or places that we love.  http://amzn.to/13RKQ2i

Make me a milkshake

from Conversations with Nic

     If you wrestle with time and survive like some have wrestled with sea serpents, maybe you can rise to the surface, eventually, to claim your rights, full selfhood.  Time is, after all, one of the common elements in escaping Nic’s pull.  Sometimes it hits you like a thunderclap or like the boom from the old camera bulbs that exploded when the photographer stomped on a miniature bellows. (Images were captured on plates like time can capture our lives.)  The sound of the boom snaps us into another reality.  We’re transported to another dimension of life, taken to an island through the ethers.  At the very least we know that something has gone through a transformation.  Somehow you’ve gotten through a wall, a diaphragm, or the sticky cocoon has crackled open because the heat of this existence had to emerge.  It always will.  Something drives me through all the twists and turns in the labyrinth like a luge run and brings me up to the street level.

     Something major has shifted.  It’s like that old joke.  You sit down at the luncheonette counter and say, “Make me a milkshake.”   Pretending to wave a magic wand the counter person says, “Boom!  You’re a milkshake.”  So if you’re moving ahead now it’s because some key ingredient has been added and the soda jerk had a sense of humor.

Purchase Nic at   http://amzn.to/14jUNUs

the wild blues is available http://amzn.to/13RKQ2i

Chaos theory or loss of a pattern

from Conversations with Nic

Chaos theory is a balm now that we know we can’t know everything.  Now we think we can at least know what we don’t know and the rest, locked inside a beautiful pattern, will unwind like the spiraling Milky Way as it spins through our time and travels into the outer galaxies of existence.  Implied in some distant future is an enfolded sense of security which will unravel during the years and rescue us and our culture from the nonlinear, chaotic realms of the present.  

And so as you twirl through the evolving turns of the labyrinthine slumber you could imagine that a loss of passion caused a pattern that  would someday be able to weave back into your existence; that, in essence, it would come back to you as prayer answered or mandala, and finally, as a part of your braided psyche.  

The chaos or loss of pattern, like a dropped stitch, was caused by some initial conditioning which you ran across in your life.  Remember when you were told to rein in your passion, hold in an ability to go full out. 

Conversations with Nic available at  http://amzn.to/14jUNUs

 the wild blue is available at http://amzn.to/13RKQ2i

Change your focus and you change your life

Inevitably, we will follow the threads of spider woman in all directions.  We will head in all the directions because we look for what is necessary to survive.  Midway between true north or deep south you will notice that there are many other roads on the way to the other directions.
Of course finding a different degree of change to bump up the journey and spice the trip could go on forever.  All that we experience is a part of the weave.  And we will weave from the belly of our experience and from the neural network in our brains.  Perhaps creating the longest scarf in the universe to trail behind us as we go on our way into our uncertain direction.

This is the way through, after all.  It’s not a break into the air or a door opening, it’s a change in our understanding, a commitment to a direction.
Conversations with Nic - a mytho-poetic journey through the lands of withdrawal.  http://amzn.to/14jUNUs
The wild blue - a prose poem about the movement from grief to resilience that is about personal loss but also how we are connected to our world and how our lives are folded back into the world again after we lose people or places that we love.  http://amzn.to/13RKQ2i

Neural networks

            In some way my neural network has started the work of Spider woman in stretching its web and integrating all aspects of my experiences to build a home.  So no matter where I am on the web, no matter what intersection or triangle the center has been set and strengthened.  But the thing is, I can’t predict where I will be on the web either.  I don’t know if this is good or bad.  But this is the way it is with webs and triangles.  As much as I want to be able to predict the structure of my life  I realize that it can’t be.  I can try to set the conditions but I can’t predict what will become of me in my becoming.  That would be impossible.  I would prefer that but then I suppose it could be tiresome to have everything so ordered and predictable.   Never said I chose the road.  It’s more like the road chose me.  It’s as if it forms me in time with it’s thickening geometry.

            I think of my neural network as being like Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes.  All points are equally strong and set in their triangular units.  The units that make up the web are a parcel and symbolic language;  a solid syntax of building that belies the delicate appearance of the structure.  If I fall apart, in some way, the structure will be there.  The framework is always more solid than the item, especially if it’s an organic “item.”  Bummer.  But true enough. 

            I think of Mark Rothko and his rectangles of color.  I thought of the abstract rectangles and his death and couldn’t fathom the depths he must have traveled to bring one color into relationship with the other on the canvas.  Yet his simple canvases speak volumes.  Ceremonial at times, their force pulls me back to something ancient.  They’re like eyes through to another way of knowing.  When I look at them I am drawn into a deeper place within myself and I wonder what went into his hands.

            I know that we can’t all survive our trip.  It seems that everything that informs us, changes us.   A condition of change is always an end to something or some state.  It’s not necessarily a definitive end that’s why we can use the word transformation.  There is always the residue of endings residing on the edge of beginnings.  If we dive off into the open seas we will change.  We will be seized by a new element and within this watery world everything is possible.  But we swim through the natal waters of our world and take residence in the element that gave birth to all that resides on land.  And our neural net holds us to what is true within us during this time. 

  

*Conversations with Nic available at  http://amzn.to/14jUNUs

*The wild blue - a prose poem about the movement from grief to resilience that is about personal loss but also how we are connected to our world and how our lives are folded back into the world again after we lose people or places that we love.  http://amzn.to/13RKQ2i