The newspaper headline read, “Love Blossomed Quickly.” Walking down the corridor it caught my eye. I thought of patterns and repeating symbols, of self-similar breakthroughs in technology and design. The kind of inventions that led to the printing press, the saltshaker, the automatic sprinkler, and the touch screen.

Patterns of thought and effort. Of love and emotion. We find ourselves surfing; riding waves generated by past faults fractured along our soul’s long journey. It’s like the difference between a misthreaded feather and a gum wrapper. Both are junk to those whom need them not, but ask the bird if trident will ever help them fly? Ask your kidney’s what aspartame ever did for them. In fact, ask the FDA what this essay does for the American Consumer. Does aspartame even impact the kidneys? Where’s your biology doctorate Mr. FLORA? Where’s your righteous indignation? I lost it in the sands of Iraq, where i’ve never been and never sweated, blown away in 2008 with the signing of Obama’s pen, which pardoned the difference between truth and long-standing conflict.

But what is a pattern but repeated history? What is greed but need accelerated? I drive fast cars like grasses catch fire but when love blooms it blossoms. When fires start, they rampage. When kidneys fail they simply pass from one phase state to another because from the Sun’s perspective we are nothing but carbon and water run amok.

What happens to a dream deferred? What happens to a nation’s soul regressed? More importantly, what happens to the festering wound when the Doctor is usurped by the local magistrate, the language evokes pornography, and the children wear belts sized 28-62 inches? ..To many questions. Or maybe it’s all the same question with different answers. Or maybe the same answers that got switched at birth got switched in your head, and it’s easier to pretend you can fly than take responsibility for the weight of gravity’s heart.

These repeated questions. Repeated vectors to the same answer which doesn’t have an easy solution. If you were a spy satellite looking down you’d see the rivers melt into dendritic patterns like blood vessels reaching for the finger’s tip.

At the edge of the cut the spill turns red, is soaked up by roots whose long dance has turned away from the sun. We know it hurts but let’s acknowledge our own entanglement, and that the probability count will always collapse to one before we get home.

I can’t imagine the courage it takes to die in peace. To give yourself over to the unknown, to release your fear of pain. I’m reminded of the Tibetan Monk who self immolated in protest of the Chinese occupation. What if every moment of suffering was full of such certainty and belief?

-6.2.2017

We have now the illusion of power, a nation turned inwards on itself. Consuming its own most treasured resources, eating its own bones till we are left with nothing but a flaccid mass of rotted plastic and clogged intellectual pores.

A nation divided by bygone lines of rusty barbwire and color-coded maps gerrymandered for your pleasure.

Divide and conquer, eat cheese, and die. Easier to consume bribes filled with colored dyes, dopamine stimulants, and tailor-made virtual experience that run on coal steam and chewed up lung tissue than to walk the cold desert space of our hearts to find emotional heat. Find water. Find love; then build a future that supports life, not just the sycophantic processes glorified by ego and lizard alike.

Easier to write than read. Easier to decode than decamp. Admit fault. Be wrong. Be humble.

Sacrifice that ego at the gates of heaven. Not for entry but exchange. Sell that tired old fur cap for something clean.

We are a nation under siege, with half the country fletching arrows and the other half trying to throw open the gates.

…actually, war metaphors aren’t appropriate. This is an education not a battle. This is a lesson, not punishment. Besides: best way to get an overreaction is to convince something it fights for its life. Best way to divide a society is convince one half that the other is wrong. We fight and die without ever realizing the we are our own teachers. We are one soul with a multitude of lessons yet to learn and a multitude of excuses yet to crumble.

-5.6.2017

The trees speak in a language of likes and hearts. Save the wild spaces they say, but the message is overrun when we bulldozed a space for our power outlets. We bulldoze our hearts to avoid the boxes constraining their beat.

Open spaces are here, we say! The future is now, we say! But cold calculated logic stands flaccid in the face of 1000 years of carbon based growth. We need no power we need no gas. The saws cut themselves and the irony is that karma is not open to debate.

So who’s to say what is what and when is why? Why not just accept you are master of your own youth and the only fear you smell is that of the burned eggs from yesterdays lunch..

4.6.2017