I was thinking back this morning about “my ways”. I do much reflection perhaps, compared to the average person, and wonder what I could have (or should have) done differently. Maybe that’s a good thing, considering that I have so many family and close friends who disagree with me so strongly on many things. I do alot of apologizing, and that’s usually just for things I’ve said.

There are some vague and looming thoughts circling my mind like vulchers blocked by the sun. I can’t quite make them out, but their shadows haunt me. What is the talent that some seem to have, for remaining oh so civil and polite with those whom they disagree with? Why do I find myself over and over crossing my own boundaries of respectable and decent conversation, hurling names and adjectives that include ugly images rather than the cold facts alone? There is no untamed beast so unwieldy as our own inner spirit, a mass of infantile desires and unfathomable appetites for self-indulgence. And yet we cannot just throw this away, like the single-minded muscle that holds our clam-shells together, we would fizzle lifeless into passivity and apathy without that fire.

There is more than such simple principles as these, which vex our best intentions. Hidden players lurk behind puppet veils, further drawing us innocently toward self-injury. Primary among these, is the master of illusion.

We are forever dreamers, even those who have no imagination by choice, drilling all color and music from their hearts for fear of being perceived as strange and outside of circles, too cowardly to sing loudly, and too self-conscious to let their wings soar them wildly. Yes, even the cold utterly meaningless lives spent in gossip and ceaseless trifling over office politics and television. Even these empty shells of souls have (without any doubt) a tiny, perhaps nearly invisible or well-hidden flame of the dream that remains. Some undernourished fantasy of wild adventure, or great accomplishments, of childhood hoped for greatness, of the trip never taken, the plunge into the unknown, or the ultimate love story untold. These unspoken, unfed dreams continue on, like a faint glimmer in the night, and have a strange effect on our perceptions from time to time.

For what appears to be but a small flame, is really a dragon’s fire. The only kind of fire that can create and destroy matter as if by a magical or thermonuclear forces, causing our perceptions to see what is not there, or to be blind of what everyone else around us can plainly see. This small flame, has over the billions of milliseconds that we perceive, carved out huge shapes that dwarf the grand canyon, such that all information is FORCED through these templates, prior to reaching our port. And this is the doomed magic, the sentence to human frailty, that we cannot escape, a flawed and corrupted perceptual system that cannot reconstruct itself completely. For that would require starting over fresh, without any preconceived categories and schema at all, and of course we all know how surgically precise water is (not!), because it will go where ever it wishes, and will relentlessly begin to smooth out whatever path it takes, beyond our control. And then the water, barring some massive earth-shaking divorce, or other trauma, will continue to gradually wear down our objectivity until we are in the end, but a construction resultant from our environment.