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