Wound Up Like The Wind

outbound
for places old and new

wound up like the wind

restless and insatiable

the mind is moving ever on

returned
yet not the same

recomposed every instant
each one a revelation

JB - 04/13/2012

I often find my mind drawn to the wind. Maybe that's because they share three letters, while the fourth is just flipped on it's head.  More likely, it's because wind strikes me as an almost mystical entity.

As a child I wondered where wind came from, and I'll admit that I still struggle to get a good mind-wrap on the subject.  For some reason, absent the childhood depictions of a face in the sky blowing air around, it just doesn't make sense to me where wind finds its impetus.

There's something fascinating about being able to take a substance like air... so near unreal that we use it as the basis for weightlessness and how soft a thing can be... yet a simple flip of perspective (it moves) turns it into something completely different.

We all think we have the world figured out, at least well enough to manage with the necessary things of life - but how dramatic a change can be brought about by a shift in status.  Sometimes we forget that all is relative.  The same glass of water is cold or hot depending on our body temperature... the sun is rising or setting depending on where we are... happiness and joy, sadness and despair come and go... even people themselves are alive or dead, given enough time.

Everything in this transitory world is inconstant, yet we must place faith upon it as it is the entire basis for our physical existence.

My over-active nerd-brain finds that a strange contradiction.

A Noodle Brain A-Noodling In A Day Dream

Stream of consciousness smacks me in the face so hard that it’s more akin to a raging river.  Instead of myself drowning, I see bits of wisdom twist and tumble by on the crests of rapids, falling beneath the surface like my wife and I once did on a swimmer’s rapid in West Virginia, only to resurface once more - distant and out of reach.

Stray epiphanies like dogs not neutered have multiplied and they're lost in my mind like so many fish that got away, soon to settle back into their dens for a long unbroken rest.  I trudge through the waters and stick my hand in every hole I can find, hoping with futility that I might scurry something up from the muck and noodle a good one.

I feel like a street light flickering - inconsistent at best, and unable to truly light the darkness even when I’m lit.  I am a moth attracted to a distant and dingy yellow haze.  I am the light at the end of my own tunnel, yet I can’t seem to mind-wrap a way to connect the dots la-la-la-la.

Always the internal dialogue speaks first of brief revelation, then longer of self-loss - an incessant and demanding distraction.

Maybe tonight I will write more of my book not-so-long forgotten.

Mr. Sir Awesome Masterpiece, Himself

I'm at a coffee shop thinking and writing today, while my side-kick wife is off on an adventure of her own.  It's her side band, of sorts, to hang out with her friends... and I'm not the jealous type.  I hope she enjoys herself as much as I plan to.

One thing I'm doing right now is to try and consolidate a few of the sporadically written/typed thoughts for my sci-fi book, which at one time or another have flowed copiously from my brain.  Mind-wrapping them together is going to be a task without trying to organize them first.  Much of what I find is interesting, but more in the vein of a passing thought than a building block for a novel.  Some of the better stuff is fun to read again.  Because I haven't revisited much of it for over a year now, it's almost like I'm reading someone else's work.

Here is a passage that I found today, originally written on August 21st, 2010.  It is (in theory) coming from the Mr. Miyagi/Yoda-type character, as he tries to open the eyes of his protege.  What I like about it is that I feel it hits on a fundamental truth, yet I could never have come up with this myself without trying to dream up something which sounds mystical and profound - two words which I would never use to describe myself.  In a way, even though I wrote it, I didn't think of it... an imagined character did, and then shared it with me.

Some will tell you that man exists to bring order to the world.  We build things, we create, and our society provides structure for a life which, through sciences and intellectual discourse, is ever-advancing.

I believe that the world exists to help man bring himself into order, that the essence of knowledge is not what one knows about the world but what one knows about himself, and that all existence speaks to the reality of man. All we have to do is to learn to listen.

Other times I find little journal entries that I wrote from some character's perspective to try and get inside their mind.  Reading them again, I see myself in the character I'm trying to create.  Am I becoming more like them, as I dream them up... or are they just a reflection of a formerly hidden self that I am uncovering slowly?

I watch the leaves falling from the trees and wonder what it would be like to do the same - to watch as unwanted bits of myself fall slowly to the ground while the rest of me remains standing, solid, and resolute; growing through it all.

Is man capable of such a revolution as the changing of the seasons?

The last type of thing that I am finding are little blurbs written here and there as cultural proverbs, as a means of trying to delve into what makes a society tick.

If ever you arrive again at the same fork in the road, you must have chosen wrong the first time.

This is fun stuff for me, and should be exciting for you.  This post amounts to a free sneak-peak at my awesome masterpiece in-progress.

That noise you hear is joy within your heart - softly booming.

Mid-Mountain Meditations / Math and God

We've all got our paths to walk, but as I look up from somewhere part-way up the infinite mountain, I find myself both exhilarated by the journey and stunned by the impossible-to-mind-wrap magnitude of it all.

Un Enlightened

my mind careens wild

down roads known

yet never explored

a path worn well

to a destination

never reached

light floats in the distance

ghostly, ethereal

never to be attained

-JB 08/08/11

The thing about the infinite mountain is that, no matter how much further I go up, I never quite get to even a percent climbed.  I can look back down the mountain and track the path from whence I came.  Even so, I haven't even begun to climb, statistically speaking.

From where I stand, (part-way up and guessing at it all), that is what the Prophets of God mean when they discuss Him as "unknowable."  My philosophy teacher liked to claim that as contradictory, for even to know God as "unknowable" is to know God.  Statistically, though, it is less than irrelevant.  I know of God, I do not know Him.  To me, that is a significant difference.

Some also ask:  

Why climb if you can't get to the top? 

I can't answer for you, but for me it is simple.  I can always move up relative to where I was/am, and that is quite rewarding... when I am able to mind-wrap the significance.