A cat--whose only signs of aging are a deep chest cough and balding eyebrows--insists on sitting on top of my arm. Life is quiet, by which I mean I am quiet. The seven of pentacles, three of wands, and the Hermit. I am coming up all waiting cards, dreaming of the return of the perversions of hope.

Diogenes follows me through a prolonged literary ramble, from an anecdote in a self-help book to a slick reference in Neil Gaiman's short stories, and now this. He is carrying the hermit's lantern, always lit in his search for an honest man. This light here has just gone out, a blown fuse I expect, and it's hard to replace.

I made no choice when I wrote down that my purpose is to create masterpieces of time and evolution, and I cannot take credit for this bit of spun silk and dreamstuff, though since the age of twelve, I've been very concerned with the puzzle of my destiny and the scope of a human life. In the Mastery of Love, Don Miguel Ruiz simply states "A dream master creates a masterpiece of life." Making a leap here, the purpose of my life is to live it, and the life of a human is itself a masterpiece of time and evolution. FORTUNE COOKIE: BE THE SYMPHONY. It is hard to loose my grasp on the idea of production, of forcing my life into some vessel of lasting worthiness.

I have reached the point in the Two Towers where I no longer want to rush ahead. This is where Tolkein splits the action into two books, the first accounting for the adventures of Merry and Pippin, Legolas, Aragorn and Gimli, and their dealings with the Ents and the Riders of Rohan and with the affairs of wizards. My favorite of all the books, I think because my motto is "Follow the wizard". And the second half, my least favorite, in which Sam and Frodo take a cold hard slog over marshes and dusty lands into Mordor, with the treacherous Gollum in tow. No magic or gallantry there. The transition from companionship, cheer and daring deeds, to a present and growing horror leaves me shocked every time.

frozen tracks

Write what you know, people say, as if they know what they mean. I'm waiting, nothing under my bathrobe, I'm waiting to write, barefoot in the chill of a winter morning, until I know something worth writing. I clip my toenails as I wait, in the pale diffuse light reflected in snow from an overcast sky, blankets of white covering the world. Instead of trudging the well-tracked margins, I'm waiting for some urgent mission to send me plowing my own track across the pages, ledger lines drawn out for me like corn-stubble marching through a snowy field. I'm waiting to be hit with sudden inspiration, before I take my morning shower. Waiting for the call of life to grip me as a hand grips a pen, waiting for life to make me its instrument. Indifference or merely indecision will dissipate, going the way of the cloud cover as a beam of sun, a clarion call, comes to galvanize me into aciton. I'll sit, then, alert, bare feet barely feeling the chill, and I'll swim through the meltwater from the thaw that was my fear bound in blocks of ice, shocked by the cold and by the pouring torrent of life rushing all at once to fill and flood the unused corners that lately were settling fields for my imagination. I'm waiting to write until I am struck forcefully on the temples by something worth writing. With all the expectancy and hush of winter, I am waiting to live until I find a reason worth stepping oug my front door, so I can knowingly take that risk and go about the dangerous business of living with the eagerness of a beloved. I'm waiting, sweating under my bathrobe, with ice cold, purpling feet and stubbly unshaven legs, my blood racing with sweet expectation that can only be the ice block's lusty dream of running fast across a plain, in love with the flowering of spring.

It's been becoming more and more obvious to me that writing, and especially writing science fiction and fantasy, is the best way to open young minds to new ideas, the meaning of life, and to convey the importance of protecting the planet we live on and creating a livable future for all. Speculative fiction, as it's called in the 'biz, gives all people but especially young people, a chance to imagine 'what if' and to explore beyond the boundaries of the known. It is through such exploration that we dream and invent and make something more inspiring of ourselves, and escape beyond the confines of current expression and conventions to realize our own potential. I was thinking about this when I found the following letter, drafted circa 2006. A bit childish, simple, but my sentiments have not changed and neither has the overwhelming message that fiction is what feeds my passion. I have a habit of writing to authors as I finish a book, my mind afire. Maybe only the last sentence is worthwhile, but for context, here is the letter I wrote:

To: Diana Wynne Jones, on the subject of The Merlin Conspiracy, a thoroughly excellent book.
This was fabulous. I must say the cover art had me quite skeptical at first. But I opened the book and immediately was plunged into an intricately, vividly entertaining story, that was both amusing and profound. With each page, a new layer was added, the whole piece weaving itself together into a delicate, delicious and exotic tapestry, like the people in the canyon world.
I enjoyed most of all Nick, Romanov, and Maxwell Hyde, the latter two for having real power and enticing complexity, and the former for not having either quality. Nick seemed so genuinely a teenage kid, with absolutely no clue what was going on, but who wanted to do something important. To have a grand adventure sprung upon such a character rings true for me. I feel sometimes that school, homework and worrying about college and test scores are just fillers, things to take up time until one day I'll just take a step sideways and find myself plunging into my real life, which will of course be full of adventure and excitement. There's got to be more to life than existing and consuming, even soaking in knowledge has begun to seem pointless and anticlimactic.
I enjoyed the very British flavor of your story. British lore can't help but have something of chivalry and King Arthur, of Stonehenge. There is a connectedness with the land, history, something archaic, something greater, that you just don't get in America. Your whole country is steeped in history and myth and magic; everyone just breathes it in I think, and the resulting works are refreshing to those surrounded by raw commercialism daily.
Thank you. I'm sure you get fanmail, but I wonder how much genuine appreciation and admiration actually gets through to fantastic authors. Definitely not enough. Thank you for a moment, a point in time, one page, when the world was still, and time held its breath, and the universe fit inside a book, and a book was a wealth of universes.

So Winter Begins

This is a time for remembering, as the first snow falls to the ground, as the winter wraps me in close in deep folds of cloth. A time for turning inward into the heart, beyond the rattle of beech leaves still clinging palely gold, rasping on their branches, the last sensory organs of a dried up season, the last glory and color of a changing perspective. A time for the stores of memory to unwind, a time to examine each garment for holes that would let in the cold, a time to shore up the foundations and the structures that support each of our beings through the long night. This is a time to sit by the fire and tell the story so that we remember who we are, and where we are going. In the dark one's identity is in question, in ways it would never be under the plain illumination, the clear brightness of day. A time of endurance and strength has come, a time of waiting while plans we have dreamed lie asleep still, waiting for us to wake up into them as to a new spring. A time that tests our preparation and our dedication, that seeks out the weak places in us and cracks us open in all our flaws, right there on the icy hillside. In this time, all our acorns must be in, and the long long arms we stretch beyond our valleys to distant lands be pulled back. We are small in winter, small and close, and we keep the heat in but the cold outside of us, and we know when to keep moving, and sometimes we stay still. And in the space where there are no cricket voices, that breath space of cold, ice cavity of a silence instead of a chest, where billowing steam on the breeze replaces the effervescence of a butterfly's lazy trace, there we hear our blood pound through hot vessels, there we hear the clear ringing of the mountain voices, a raven's startle.
I sit and I remember. I remember how the mountains never felt lonely, on those gray blank days when they were wrapped in snowy blankets. Quiet but purposeful, the mountains bowed to receive their caps. It was beauty on a scale only my heart could conceive of, large in the child's chest that housed it. I would tromp along willingly in the wake of its tug, my boots flopping in time with my flouncing scarf and windmilling arms, mittens securely attached. I didn't know why the resonant chords of the mountains, the fact of their presence, laid bare against the snow, should leave such a welling sadness within me, so solemn for an eight-year-old experiencing the weight of the world. The enormity of the love I felt consumed me without outlet, I could not relate it on a human level, nor understand it. I was simply covered, like an avalanche. I found myself running, running, struggling through snowdrifts, wading when it became deeper and entered my boots, urgently heading somewhere, collapsing in the blank hysteria of an empty field, white as a page, my footsteps laid out behind me. Those footsteps proved the pinnacle of my grief, that I would move a tiny mouse pinned to the land, so removed from the rolling vastness of the mountains I longed for, encompassed but never encompassing. I sought the memory I now hold, memory of flight. Memory of my true sight of the world, my falcon's eyes, with which I envisioned all laid out before me, beat wings with which I gave thanks for all laid out beneath me. A hopeless, sweet child I struggled in utter confusion, barraged by the senses I once knew how to make sense of, fledgling in freefall, not yet knowing to spread my wings. The mountains received my keening and echoed back my cries to the crisp, falling snow.

What I thought about last night and what I am right now, these are things not taken lightly. I dreamed a burning house. I was the house and the dreamer. I burned myself and I was relief in the wake of those ashes. The clarity. And I think that the house was unwanted. And if there was anything that I needed, I didn't need what was in the house, the house was wrong.
There are hours of the day where I have time to myself. I go infinitely in, like the hanged man on the card. If there was something for me to do I would keep it to myself. A true meaning presents itself. And the fortune on the cookie left ripples in the air. If there was a message written on a little slip of paper... A man reads a fortune cookie and has a perfect realization. What happened, what brought him to that dawning? What were the events that made so much sense when he read that slip of paper? If we could be so lucky, our lives would fit like novels into sense and cohesion, ended by two books, one beginning, one closing, and all the threads neatly tied. But the center of self cannot hold in coheshion without sacrificing a swim. The neurotic drowns in water he was meant to swim in. The mystic swims in the sea. I think I'm setting out in a boat. If all the docks are dry where do the ducks go in winter?
I am on a journey. What house will I build to replace the one that burned? I think I will live in the old and worn house of Joseph Campbell. I will walk the tattered floor where I felt vertigo. I will converse with pale clapboards and the slate-grey sky. I will associate with the wind.

Dream:

Either I was a girl or her beloved. I opened the door... or I proposed-- in this way-- I made a pun about zoo animals, then said 'Will you marry me,' placed her own ring on... my finger, I was disappointed that it wasn't new. And then ...I grabbed her breasts and walked her back into the apartment, murmuring. We sank down onto the couch... It felt good so I didn't stop him, but the door was open so I went to get it to close it. Then I said, I'm pregnant... and as she talked I felt a huge disappointment, (This is not how it was supposed to go, by any measurement.) We abruptly changed places.
In my dream, the couple goes on to find and then escape from a meeting of the KKK, led by Starhawk, who says, "And if we don't catch them, oh well."
My rationale: I feel like I am a surprised young couple not ready for committment, rushing into things, not knowing how to show I care for myself. I am being chased and dogged by my missing convictions.

Dreamstates: Vision and flight

This is another attempt at documenting my inner landscape. Let's hope it sticks this time. Each narrative is related in a larger whole through journeys into the dreamtime. My goal is to make the stories relatable and inspiring, and leave some personal details out of it. Dreamwork is pretty easy, all you have to do is close your eyes.
* * *
An inner voice impelled me to sit down, and then turn to face a closed door, and next to close my eyes. I found myself flying on the back of a peregrine falcon past a stream of colors. A great owl was ahead of us, and time stretched as the tiny falcon and I encircled his enormous shoulder to face him. The owl, not gently at all, said, “Wake up, the phone call is for you, stupid!” He then touched the tip of his wing feathers to the center of my forehead. Light began to beam from the touch and swirl all around us. Then the owl brushed me with his wings, as if removing dust from the space all around my body, clearing out my aura. I remember thinking how much I want an owl wing. As I am thinking about wings, he traces the place under my arms where my wing feathers will grow. He tells me that when I get back to the real world I will be able to fly. Then the owl pauses, examining my arms. It is as if something is missing from among my invisible-as-yet-ungrown feathers. “Where are your pinions?” he asks. With that question, I resurface.

The chariot

I see the charge of my task as a rocking horse on the tidal sands of a beach. This horse is stationary like the Chariot in the tarot deck, yet they both contain the meaning of direction. One foot in water, and one on land, the charioteer brings together opposites, light and dark, to guide them in the same direction, steering opposite forces to move in a productive direction. At the moment, I stand in an estuarine environment, a changing borderland where forces impact and diffuse, bleed one into the other. The question that the charioteer must answer: does this movement carry me closer to my goal? And then comes the knowledge that headlong pursuit may be ruinous. As the chariot draws up alongside its opponent it is victorious. The chariot says that victory is what happens after the battle, the governing of a new kingdom, and drawing from that polarity into a united directed purpose.

Is this my lake? Is this the clear water of my reflective self? Tall water moving. Old water sleeping. The reservoir of being. When I picture a container, perhaps it should be a lake: spring-fed stream flowing in, river estuary flowing out, standing in the footprint of mountain ranges, mirroring my silver soul with the upside-down summits. What dreams are bourne across those waters, what secrets buried in their depths? The echoes of any sound I make can be heard from miles off, transmitted in a perfect crystalline whisper. I brook no interruptions in my musings but my mermaid mind merges with the waves of millfoil. Mine is a feathery, rolling sea, and if I were standing on a moor in England the heather tossing in the wind would remind me of it, as alfalfa and mugwort do, in the sighing fields of home. 'The tide! The tide!' young Keats would bellow, from the lookout of a pasture stile, and I would bound with him, pointing out the undersides of leaves visible on the nearest oak or maple, meaning that a storm is on the way.

out-standing in my field

The plant that nightly makes meadows smell sweet is rightly named fragrant bedstraw, along with purple and pink vetch clinging to tall grass stalks full of grain, and daisies waving gently in the breeze, campion forming white pillowy clouds, and elecampagne sweet and low to the ground. Clover awash in white and red, and strawberry peeking from low-growing beds. Black-eyed susans and loosestrife, buttercups too, and parsnip and goutweed, goldenrod, alfalfa, dandelion, morning glory, aster, and the twinkling silver coming from the underbellies of waving leaves on the small aspens growing casually, five feet from the edge of the field, as if no one would notice their encroachment.

The sound of home is the rustle blue-green of these leaf beings on a summer night. A creature sound. They are tall and have stood there ever since I can remember. Can they remember me? I ask. I am a wild one, a small bark scrambler with barked shins, scratches where I scrabbled up the trunk, perfectly perching high above a burbling river bed. This is what the trees remember, my almost still gaze, blood pounding as I crouch, precious gasps as I wonder at the set of day, elated and pleased to be several dozen feet higher than usual as if I had gotten away with something.

My heart has always been in the heart of a certain field, a low point on the land but an open one from which the sky is apparent, and the nearby mountains make their presence known, the funny one shaped like an anvil. An itch that I've had since I was small urges me to run towards open sky, and standing here, I can see wide vistas. A glitter, the light reflecting off a metallic angel, that pilot and I the only ones who know the secret of this sky, its freedom. You and me, buddy. You and me. I don't envy him, whoever he is. He has to look at his instruments, and focus on work, and is surely above the brilliant color display. I in my field see it all pass before me. Like one of my trees, my glory is in watching the world passing by and furthering, becoming. Who else will take the time to notice? If I do not stand out in the field and gaze into this stretch of sky, my stretch of sky, with weather passing across the canvas in a brilliant ever-changing show of wonder, if I do not stand here, will someone else?

The colors of home are the light on hills at evening. How can green become so pink before it all goes dark blue? The clouds on up through the stratosphere each in their turn follow suit in a gentle blending motion. It is suddenly not fair that every sunset has been painted as if only in one moment, when sunsets are temporal events, changing from one moment to the next, now it is the most beautiful, no, now, now, now, until it's blue in gray or is it gray in blue? and I can no longer tell the clouds from the sky nor distinguish the patterns of the leaves and the dew brushes cool against my scraped shins and I turn my steps for home because the day is gone.

the four letter words

Dear ____,
I just had a dream which is about to slip away. But I want to remember the sense: we do what we do, save the world or author it, shape it, become its architects, because of the strenght we get from being with other significant people. The architects of the world, the true Poets, its saviors, create spontaneously, without apparent effort, but always because they must, because some need, some impulsion drives them to great urgency. At this time their great precision, their carefully schooled behaviors and skills, allow them to flawlessly tap that which is the power of the universe, and use it in the service of Change (which should be a four letter word but isn't). Despite Fear, our strength.. no, BECAUSE of Fear, our strength lies in unity, not separation, unity centered on the perfect and abiding quality of LOVE. We are small in the measure we separate and close our hearts, and we are great in the measure we dare to let LOVE dream through us and imagine the blossoming of the future of the world. This is why the world needs LOVE above all else, and why the greatest force for altering current situations may still exist, dormant, among the masses. A friend told me evolution has not been survival of the fittest, all these years. In Darwin's later writings he theorized that LIFE was kinder than that. What would a world look like if we turned to the understanding, like he eventually did, that we evolve best through (or rather, in the direction of, towards) our experiences of Beauty, Truth, and LOVE, and through our integrity to those concepts and a deepening of the experience of humanity?
What might the world look like with calm LOVE at the wheel, instead of raw Fear pushing from behind, propelling us? Is that not a worthy goal?
If we stop to calculate everything in our Fear and our isolation, then what we miss is LIFE! And the vibrant, insane, jerry-rigged inventions of the dream will never come into being. But our science, our art is far greater than mean calculation, and as we talk to the universe, we shall become its next shapers, for ill, or indeed, for better.
***
All such power is metaphoric, and if I told you the contents of my dream, the horrors, the struggles in their particulars, it would mean nothing to you, less than nothing. Yet what I have read from such images may, I hope, be writ large upon mankind.

light in the dark forest

As I drifted, I saw a luminous being arise from my seat beneath an old spruce. She was ghostly glowing in a flowing gown, and she ran into the forest suddenly stretching out before me, though I called out to her to wait. I tried to catch her, I tried to keep her from leaving me behind, but she twisted and turned, becoming a pinpoint of light that disappeared into a deep and needle-cushioned corner of my mind. I worried that something had left me then, that I would not have a hold on all that was myself, and I would not return fully intact. What if I severed the connection abruptly and a part was lost wandering with the forest girl?

Then Alberto Villoldo, whose words drop like stones into a still pond, so that a few sentences send ripples to my very core, had this to say:
"The shaman with whom I studied believed that he could track his luminous nature--what we call the soul-- through time the same way that he could track a deer through the forest. He claimed to have followed the luminous threads of his being as far back as the Big Bang at the beginning of time, and into the future, tasting who he was becoming, and beyond, to when our universe will again return to that singularity from which it was created." (excerpt from Shaman, Healer, Sage)

I saw the girl again, as my fleeting soul scampering ahead of me down some path only visible to her deep into the forest before me. I did not need to stop her, because she had not lost her way. I had rather to follow her, and come at the last to the very heart of stillness and age, where I will step into her as she stepped out of me in pursuit of that becoming. My future self scampering off to become, and me following in its wake, stepping into each new future, each new second, following the thread of light.

Dozed off in the middle of 'Alice'

Dozed off in the middle of 'Alice'
dream'd of things wild and wet
and woke to just a hint of Carrollian imaginings lingering on the tongue and crusting about the eyes.

Dreamstate

Some countries and states are wordless. To describe those places is to steal thought when one returns. Words are things smuggled fretful from that foreign land, released, that should never leave had the customs master his way.

And on the occasion when they are released, it seems I would do best to send them back.

what's to come

An old standby.
'Light up, light up
As if you have a choice
Even if you cannot hear my voice
I'll be right beside you dear.'

This song reminds me I am tinder.
Calcinatio: Burn faster, louder, closer
Be someone else's, be consumed.
If you're not on the rollercoaster,
You are standing still, ash.
Turn, world,
glare, sun,
and let me face the end,
what is the phrase?
oh yes, blaze of glory.

Echo

This is a day for old songs.
Remembering where I've been
the eye stares at the hand
and wonders at its incomprehensible music.
Before, there was no barrier.
Now I am sitting in a rocker watching the world.
Now I am remembering.
How did creation flow through my hands?
Sensation unknowable.
The past rises up through my feet,
a dust cloud of moments
tangible, tinged with gold.
I exist to illuminate them
My little lantern-soul flickering
in the palms of these hands.
Come, let us tell the story again.

Do you remember waiting for the bus
in the early morning snow
smelled the frost and cold exhaust
frozen nose hairs (and the sharp
burst of cold air in your lungs)?
I was a dragon, mittened, bundled,
waddling, misting poison gass,
smoking like an absurd locomotive
in my bright ensenbleof primary colors
while the salt glittered with rainbows
of antifreeze on the pavement.
We did a dance so that our toes would not fall off
So happy to be zipped in up to our chins
mittens tucked up inside the sleeves
only waiting to shed all the layers
socks wet, hair tangled
everything un-tucked
when we come tumbling
inside from recess.
But the bus is still coming
childhood ambitions still unfulfilled
Castle forts are only the biggest snowbanks,
the lightning-speed rocket still only the playground slide,
packed down with snow.

See

I remember climbing up into the maple tree and sitting there in its arms and feeling held by the green bowers' embrace an expansive love enfolding me hidden, invisible, green fairy of the air I was, a small thing that could climb with skinny legs dangling, an apple and a book. What else the summerhood child of pleasures? My green libraries the sundappled pages that shifted all around me with the whisper of a thousand voices, each a character and each a friend, their names and patterns known to me within the wide world of my myopic inspection
daydream self that stumbled stopped dead at every dewdrop, pebble alive in millions, little worlds in every corner framed by my own fascinated mind.

What I could learn of, eagerly I climbed, remembering not the day I marveled first, saw the leaves on the trees, unlooked-for mystery revealed, two small windows--each one eye--and worlds were opened, trees, books, everything that I could fit within the frame and always and intently press the bridged glass-rim further up my nose, if the windows were only closer I could see more, know more, peer into the very corners of the universe, tease out test answers, life answers, read what's written on the board, read what's written in the wind, stay a little longer before the great show, spend another moment, breath forgotten, lost in delicate intricacy. Be quiet enough and read far enough long enough read the spaces in between the books upon the shelves, the curves between what is now and what is storied, stored. Futures, sometimes, maybes, more windows seeing past to untold worlds. Around the next corner, or the next, inside the next cover, beneath the trunk, the shafted sunlight, if I hunch my shoulders and direct the torrent, hold my head still with both hands, I might yet find the biggest frame.

Streaming

I have been seeing the ghosts of things past
Sitting in a seat facing backwards on the train to watch the memories and milemarkers streaming out behind us, in front of me. Visions living in the spaces behind mirrors.
Have I regrets?
I am walking along a road, it has rained and the maple leaves lie damp in the gutters. Their companions rustle and sigh in the wind's caress, waiting for release. Autumn lies thick on the land, and the blonde bleached grass and mottled browns of scrub extend over the valley. The only accents are the few blazes of color in the lone holdout trees. I glimpse a river running behind a house. The water is brown with slate grey reflections from the sky, and it looks cold. Its burbling is barely audible, muffled by trees and houses, but I want to stand and hear the full roar. I have come to a fork and choose the path closest to the river, hoping it will open up onto the bank, and I start to walk parallel, craning to see in between the houses. I am approximating, always anxious to see how soon the full flow will come into sight. The farther I go along the road, the more I feel the cold and heavy feeling of committing to a path. Should I have struck across the high grass at the first sight of water, lifting my arms and scooting sideways for a closer look? The river isn't going to meet up with the road. It must curve back around. And now I am taking myself farther and farther away from the clarity I so desperately wanted. Cut off from the source. Car fumes settle around me and refuse to dissipate into the autumn wind. Everywhere boxes and parallel lines, but all I want is to cut the corners. Find the hidden torrent and be swept away.

Anything but wings

Here it is, the poem towards the end of the book about fireflies.
Go into the twilight.

I am the one holding the bubble wand. Fortunately (?) my power is in positively altering my environment, though I often do not directly feel the results. Let's talk about allelopathy, secreting chemicals that alter the growing environment and make it less hospitable for one's competitors. Allelopathy is an adaptive strategy. That's not what I do. I am about the business of making things slightly better in the space all around me. I focus and create bubbles, dandelion tufts, things beautiful and simple and buoyant that are dispersed on the wind to take root in some forgotten corners. I no sooner breathe than create, no sooner create than rejoice. And my greatest joy is in the motion and interaction that my loves and small attentions conceive. I create a place that is a little bit better, a little richer, than anywhere else, maybe it is the only clean patch and neat, or riotous and vibrant, but the party which is open, is open even to the people who come and take (we call them generalists) who will take what I can give and then move on. They pop the bubbles which would have died anyway, but they tread on the goldeny threads of inspiration and cosmic joy in that moment of dance between the world and the senses. They are loud and don't know what I have begun to say in the quiet. My worlds are not hidden from the street traffic, and everyone can see what is valuable in it but not why, and they pull the meaning up by the roots, dissect it to see if it had merit. A disincentive perhaps to share my world, to exhale (my being and my breath). Every body has to survive, but if I can't help but live in mutualistic association and I have no protecting symbiont the world takes care of itself by taking from me anything that I offer.

Show up at the page, appearing at this window I offer myself up as a blank mind to the tender mercies of the winds, Muses as faint in scent, as feathery to touch, as invisible, as passingly extant as all thought and inner experience flowering into some product the subtlest fluid of which it is permissible to drink and in drinking to be drunk deeply, to pour forth that fountain-- that voluble torrent of love and care, the softest words whispered to oneself and the dark ceiling in the night beyond light in the twilit chambers where filters each shadow becoming impressions on the pastel wall, as memorable as water beads running in the shower, and as intently noted even while they slide away all. Words are free and thus is their pain; to live fleeting, mutable lives in the mind, altering the landscape for the space of half an eternity--half a second. What could matter in this ever-fixed ever-changed war, where transformation is the only constant, the only choice, and the particular, the definite marks death?

I am frustrated with my own slow progress, self-referential loops that leave me myopic in the passive and descriptive, endless circular thoughts filled with commas, with hesitation. I am frustrated with the way my mind settles and clears following stones thrown to the bottom of a lake. How long it takes. I am the stone-thrower. I fight the gradual accumulation of what I already sense, and would stamp my feet to have the whole before me. Despite my tantrums I work steadily, I progress despite myself, or when I am asleep. I must keep myself in the dark, work miracles behind closed eyelids. No wonder my waking self forgoes sleep as long as or longer than it can physically be forgone, anything in rebellion, anything but what my deep self dreams of, anything but wings. Why can I not grant that boon in and for myself? I am yet keeping myself powerless. Stalemate with stale hopes on a dusty shelf, when I know that the snowglobes hold castles and patterns of the deepest shades, burgundy, royal blue, and the gold that burns. Dust is useful to me yet, and it suits my mood. Things which are glorious pretend at the tawdry. After all, from what matter sprung creation?