Friday, December 7, 2018

Entry Note To Self...invisible paths

Journal Entry: 12/6/18
Invisible Paths

"You are here because you know something. You don't
 know what it is, but you can feel it. Something is wrong with the world."
— Morpheus, The Matrix

✍️
As the age turns, millions of people are pioneering a transition from the old world to the new, are we not? It is a journey fraught with peril and hardship and breathtaking discovery, a journey irreducibly unique for each of us.

Because we are stepping out into the new, (or at least it feels that way to me), it is also profoundly uncertain and at times lonely. I cannot map out the details of my path, but I can fortify myself as I walk it and and maybe just illuminate some of its universal features.

So a few years ago I started to make Entry Notes to myself. My purpose, I suppose, was to give some voice to what I have always known (without knowing it) and always believed (without believing it).

Maybe in some grand way I was hoping that someone might stubble across my thoughts and symbols, and just for a second, breathe a sigh of relief and say, "Ah, I was right all along."

In a sense I am not describing a path at all, since there isn't one in the new territory of the new pioneer. Indeed, what I am describing is a departure from a path, the ready-made paths laid out before us, and the creation of a new one.

You know the ready-made path I'm talking about. Typified by that odious board game "Life," it begins with school, traverses the territory of marriage, kids, and career, and, if all goes well, ends in a long and comfortable retirement. This program has been crumbling for decades now. I, for one, am not planning for a retirement for my journey; the very concept feels alien to me, as does the notion that my Golden Years are to be any time other than right now.

Just a pioneer, like you...Be well, Doc

Entry Note To Self... rhythm of life

Journal Entry: 10/13/18
Sensing Beauty

My rhythm of life in recent weeks has been different. Not difficult, or taxing, but certainly not mind blowing either. Except for the crap I see on TV news entertainment. I really don't pay that much mind as I have more need of my mind for other things that capture my interest. It is one of those periods I am just not in sync.

I don't even know how to define it, because it does not require defining. Just one of those periods with a different intensity, frequency and duration of thoughts.

Duration of thoughts? What is my mind dwelling on? Different are the thoughts from others periods in my life and other rhythms? Maybe, but that is how it is this morning...

The tide ebbs and flows daily, without end.
Four times a day it will ebb and flow.
Breathing new life along the way and destorying others in it's path.
The rhythm of tides.

The Moon waxes and wanes, changing its face daily as It moves from Full to New and Full again. A wanning and waxing gibbous or crescent It becomes. The dark side of the moon becomes light again and nothing is static as it changes again and again. The rhythm it becomes.

In the morning dark, on the porch with coffee, just above the treetops, no fewer than seven squadrons of geese just flew over. They were speeding, honking like crosstown New York traffic. Migrants. This scene, this music, allows me to feel more human, like I'm connected to something larger than my own thoughts, or my own small reality. Good morning, friends.

Wishing you ease...Doc

Reflections From The World...a new day

Journal Entry:12/1/18
A new day...a new month...a new thought, perhaps.

Just being there, she was a sort of music, perhaps a garden canticle. Half-painted and never moving, she gripped her urn like a victory cup, waiting. Watching the garden forever, for the entirety of her life, the ancient South American staghorns, magnolia, jasmine, sweet olive, the iron gate, and masonry of the place were always safe. But she never went inside the garden itself. I never saw her inside. That is how it was for her, for me.

"Walked for half an hour in the garden. A fine rain was falling, and the landscape was that of autumn. The sky was hung with various shades of gray, and mists hovered about the distant green of a melancholy nature. The leaves were falling on all sides like the last illusions of youth under the tears of irremediable grief. A brood of chattering birds were chasing each other through the shrubberies, and playing games among the branches, like a knot of hiding schoolboys. Every landscape is, as it were, a state of the soul, and whoever penetrates into both is astonished to find how much likeness there is in each detail."

Reflections From The World...Christopher Bryson

The Christopher Bryson Series

Abraham Lincoln carried a harmonica in his pocket, and harmonicas were played by soldiers on both sides of the American Civil War. Frontiersmen Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid played. In the mid-1920s DeFord Bailey made mouth harp recordings, and duo recordings with guitarists Hammie Nixon, Walter Horton, and Sonny Terry. In 1925 there were 50 harmonicas on the White House Christmas tree.

These tears fall from my eyes,
as the rain falls from the sky.

I walk through the rain,
so you can't see me cry.

But only when the rain drops fall from the sky,
so you can't see the things that I hide.

Robert Louis DiTullio, Jr.
Harmonica Player
Faubourg Tremé
New Orleans, Louisiana

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