Illuminating the Cobwebs

A valid argument could be made that this blog is kinda just me being this guy.

With that in mind, I'll avoid apologizing for not posting more. It's not as though the world is suffering from a lack of my speech anyway.

What is this blog for, then? I'll get to that in a moment.

At one point in my life I wrote a lot. Not a lot by professional writer standards, but I wrote a lot of very introspective things that were sometimes philosophical, sometimes engineer-like. I liked doing it, and it helped me get a sense of what I actually think. Sometimes I felt compelled to stay up past my bedtime (like tonight, oddly enough), and jotted things down til my mind felt fuzzy and happy that I'd gotten something out into the world of language. I've filled a red wide-ruled notebook that I got for free after helping with a promotional video for my alma mater with this stuff. I also write things in my laptop when I want to bypass the graphite-on-paper step.

So what's the point of all that? If I'm wondering what the point of blogging is, and I'm wondering what the point of jotting my thoughts down is, maybe I might as well let the two of them synch up. I'm not particularly shy about most of the things I write about (very little is politics, which seems to be what I'm most shy to talk about), so I might as well make them public. Without false humility I will say that I don't know if this will make anyone's life better, but I communicate with people a lot less than I used to, before I moved to California and had kids, so maybe putting my thought journal out there will be a good way to get things moving.

What I propose to do is copy a bit a time from this long-running journal here under the "Illuminating the cobwebs" tab. To start, here's something I wrote in March of 2012:

It’s like there are these two worlds. Two domains. There’s the world of sensing, of awareness and introspection, and then there’s the domain of math and method, and cause and effect. There’s a barrier between them, between the world outside and the world inside, like a flat sheet of glass. You’re looking straight into it, so you can’t see the interface. But it’s not glass at all. It’s water, and when something moves over the surface of that water, it shimmers, and the way the ripples catch the light is breathtaking. It knocks you down, makes your mouth gasp and your mind reel, and all you can do to keep up is think beauty, beauty, beauty. Think isn’t even the right word. Your mind flows and runs until all that you are is all that’s in touch with this magnificence that’s being.

The only proper response is laughter. It’s a humble laugh, a wild-running expression of the euphoria it is to be this moment. The universe reads to us a picture of light and sound and motion, and we read back a wildfire image of emotion and gratitude. What else could there be? What else could we do?

The world of atoms and the world of wonder aren’t adversaries. They harmonize. When the line between them shakes and twinkles you see how they weave together like never before. Joy becomes light, colored light, colored light that moves, lupines flapping on a March morning breeze. Causation becomes trend, function, interaction, emergence of knowledge. To know. We want to know. We want to know by the language we speak, by the book, by theory, but we also yearn to know by taking this world to heart, by sensing, by seeing our innermost selves in it.

How do our inner worlds come to know this outer world? It’s a mystery, a necessary one, to the linguist. But to the explorer it just is. There’s a frontier, and knowing it piece by piece and bit by bit is a magical thing of joy. You who have seen the touch of this magic, in a beautiful song, in a religious awakening, a lover’s touch, or a psychedelic journey, will never walk the Earth the same way. For you will know the ecstasy it is to be, and will long to be the euphoria of life again.

In case you're wondering, the pictures in this series will be non-sequiturs; just pretty stuff I've taken here and there.