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