Perception

When we peel back the thin gossamer of our perceptions, what is it that we see there staring back at us? What is truth? Is the truth what we can see? Is it what we can touch, smell, or hear? Is it just that the truth, the reality is what is happening between our ears, inside the synaptic junctions flashing at light speed in our brains as we struggle to understand.
I think that I've hit bottom sometimes, and I feel that I can't string a few words together to describe a feeling or a thought. I write something most every day, whether it's a scribble in a notebook, a post in a blog, or something for my courses. But the words which I can attach to things, they seem to be coming slower lately, more labored, and perhaps with more difficulty. Perhaps it's the onset of old age at 33, or maybe it's an excessive imbibe of alcohol from time to time, who knows...it could be some bad hamburger, the ozone, the cleaners, or any environmental, physical, psychosomatic factor. All I know is that there are spaces, where the efforts to describe a thought, or a feeling, are growing more difficult. My perceptions of life, perhaps, are changing.
I think that at times, I try to stop thinking, to dwell in an empty-ignorant haze, just so I don't have to deal with some events which surround me. Maybe it's time to come back and pour all of that crap out. Maybe I should pull back the thick layer of gauze that I've covered over my perceptions of late, step back out of the shadows, and let the sun warm my face again.

Right Brain

Happiness is the qualification of your efforts by the right side of your brain.

Maybe I've been thinking about the dual nature of humanity lately. There's a creative side and an analytical side, so why wouldn't our greatest moments of happiness come from those moments when both sides of our brain are in complete agreement?

Left Brain

Where the heck does the day go? There you are working away on something, totally absorbed in it, and then suddenly it's 10 pm. Isn't the conscious mind a remarkable thing? How our perceptions fool us with linear time; making one moment of dread last forever as bliss passes in a wink.
I guess that's what is meant by, ignorance is bliss. Whether it's the ignorance that comes from being absorbed in the moment, or the ignorance born from unknowing. When the trappings of our analytical mind are prevented from intrusion upon coloring our realities we are left to our creative interpretations of what we see before us. How the sun sets in the evening, how the daisies grow in summer, and how the birds fly south in the winter. The mundane becomes remarkable without the harshness of reason.
The absence of creative spark, of inspiration, and joy leaves us longing. Inside of everyone there is a piece of the universe that is connected on some level to a world which is much larger than we can ever know. Those gossamer threads that run between hearts, connecting the far away together, and the close even closer; find purchase in words. Those threads are woven into tapestries, invisible, only to the unseeking. Those who never seek, shall never find, their anylitical minds forever dominating their view with shades of black and white.

Spiders on a Screen

I wonder what it's like sometimes to be a spider perched on the screen of a porch and suddenly you're brutally flipped away from an unknown force into a somewhat familiar environment of grass. It must be a sudden shock for that moment of time, though to the spider who likely doesn't have the same concept of time it must be an eternity to be falling toward the ground and to suddely be buffeted by blades of grass. I suppose that those same things happen to us in our own lives. We fall into our own complacency with how our lives are, the routines of our daily lives and then from nowhere a force comes into our perceptions and hurls us headlong into a new perception. At that moment we're given the choice to seek out new paths, new routes to success, new modes of being, and new horizons...or we can simply die there in the grass.
Yes, I've changed the perceptions of a few spiders in my time. It's a hobby of mine. When I see them on my screen porch, like a mischevious child I decide that I'm going to flip them off the screen. It's the closest that I come to affecting the lives of any other beings on this planet in the short term at least. I suppose you can make a correlation between the parent/child role also. Will you be a parent who supports the child like the blades of grass, or that which flips your child maliciously from the screen which they've climbed for so long to reach a perch upon? But, deeper still...there are other correlations which can be made. God, The Universe, The Prime Mover, Shiva, Allah, Buddah, or whatever you call the Supreme Being is essentially that same sort of mindset which I've expressed here.
We climb all our lives to reach a zenith, a precipice where we can look over into the abyss and see what we've been striving for our entire lives. When, at the moment of our greatest revery, after we've stalked our prey for so long, in a moment...everything changes and we're forced to start anew. It could be a death, the destruction of our homes, a divorce, a marriage, or some other major change in our own specific paradigms. Regardless, it happens to everyone, shall we just give up and die there in the grass...or seek out other screens, other points of superiority, and other vistas for our dreaming?

One more thing

We the people, in order to form a more perfect union have deemed it necessary to place unexperienced people in the highest positions of government. Sure, it's old news, but it's still irritating. Why is it that there seems to be a scourge loose where you don't need to know anything, but you do need to know someone?
Harriet Miers and Mike Brown spring to mind, they seem to embody that old phrase. Whatever happened to having hard work recognized and earning a position? Isn't that what it's about?

There are scary things happening in the world, but they're going to happen and we're powerless to stop them. Powerless that is, unless we choose to take steps to stop them.

I could go on about this, but I've got a country to run, I just got promoted.

My next _______ will be a _________

This whole game of life, sometimes it really kicks you square in the teeth. Somedays your up on the top of the game, and then next there you are stuck in the proverbial Monopoly jail with the bloody thimble. I guess that everything has it's purpose in our lives. Each of these silly incidents that happen to us are supposed to teach us a lesson, give some guidance, direct our path a bit through the maelstrom that our lives gradually degrade into, but c'mon. After you've already learned the lesson, when is the teacher going to step outside for a smoke break?
I'm not going to get into the particulars of what the lesson that I've learned is, or which one I'm studying another chapter of, but needless to say it's not a pretty lesson to learn. I shut down sometimes, I guess everyone does. You just get to a point where you've got all these things plugged into the wall, you're running full power, the blender is slinging crap all over the place, the television is blaring, the radio is playing some terrible ballad from the 80's, and in the middle of it all the washing machine is bouncing all over the living room.
What I'm getting at is, marriages sometimes end, and the obviously end for a myriad of reasons. But you would think that two people could find some way of getting along afterward, some uneasy silences that reach a peaceful settling of the dust. Although, there are instances, perhaps many of them where it's an impossibility for the people to get along. Such is life, such is the game, stalemate.
It's difficult to vent and not just spell out the reasons for why or what is at the root of the problem, but it's cathartic to approach it from another vantage point. One where you're describing it to yourself, but where anyone else looking into your life would be puzzled and wonder, what the heck?

Anyway, it's been a while since I've posted anything here. Hell, it's been a while since I've written much of anything that wasn't related to schoolwork. I started all of this blithering so I'd sit down and write in a forum that was new, something to jog the writing juices, give myself a forum for free-writing, but lately..I feel those introspective tugs. I think I've really been avoiding confronting some things, just because they irritate me so much. But, things aren't going away are they? They'll remain there, festering until you grab them out and shake them up in the light of day.

Again, I'm wishing that I was somewhere else. Far away from this point in life, in another part of the globe, in another time all together. Eventually, it's going to happen where I'm happy in the moment again. It only takes a moment for our rhythms to be upset and we're plunged headlong into madness, off kilter, spinning out of control, but it takes time for us to find that comforting pattern of routine to embrace us and silence the living that swirls around us all.