Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Rose, thorn and fragrance

The taste of life is so subtle, delightfully complex, bitter sweet... aromatic. Here in Nihon, we have the moist wave of clouds encircling my home, in the magical haze of the rainy season. Temperatures fluctuate from tropical forest to chilly damp mountaineering. My life is riddled with hard core emotional delicacies, a gourmet buffet of buffering challenges. I will not articulate these here, these petty chores, trails and tributaries, that crown all domestic and professional integrity. We all have sweaty brows in this climb up and out.

I tried unsuccessfully to retire the God concept, interwoven as it is into my pea brain personalized didactic. How can I teach in a head created by others, even when that head is my own? Yet I enjoy the skeptic's freshness, the raw dance of persistent ruthless critique. It is a cruel world, demanding an intellectual purity, always slightly over my own horizon.

I wish I could justify my primate tendencies... my swinging pendulum of man and beast. But the internal holocaust and its hedonistic healing are two sides of the same thick skull. Pain and pleasure is how we monkeys learn. I wish I could ask for forgiveness, yet so clear, I error in my very nature... my very core convoluted, to what is expected. I relentlessly remain responsible, within my own philosophical dictum.

In other words: Tragically, majestically, you get what you see... I stand here before you, naked, apple still in hand. Guilty as charged in my wild man innocence. Welcome to the real world, post-Paradise lost; Eternally Adamized.

Saturday, June 16, 2007

Ants in My Pants

I have quietly spent my Saturday absorbed in podcasts, and now will begin my day of expanding my garden and visiting a gallery opening. My pursuit of science, or at least the initial trappings of such, has revitalized my academic pursuits, from other visceral perspectives gone asunder. I haven’t time now to describe in detail this transformation, as there are too many variable. Instead I will simple acknowledge Hitchens, the podcast 'Point of Inquiry', and the comical biographical work "Letting Go of God" by Julia Sweeney.

Sunday, June 10, 2007

Trying to Evolve

Perhaps I have found the adjustment to eliminate the trouble I was having with this software. In life there is so much personal work going on, yet the angst that 'time is too short for actual understanding' pursues... true transformation being more elusive than mere bug fixes.

Point of Inquiry, a secular humanist podcast, has me buying books again like crazy. Previous to this topic, on-line purchased books have been coming on my resurrected interest in film-making. Also, gardening and gardening books have flooded into my life, with trees following roses following diverse flower collections springing from feminine companionship, in and on every available space in yard, terrace, and house.

The transition I sense is grounded in my geography, an inner relationship with my house here in the hills of Japan. The anniversary of my wife's death looms on the horizon of summer bringing with it further reflection and the remaining deep pangs of sadness. My decision to pull in, and stay here in Japan this summer, is a shadowy choice. There are as many subconscious reasons as conscious, as I try to map out progressive actions, within a soft-focused vision of the future, laden by such dense fog.

There could be so much to say here, but I dissipate much of my reflective writing into a handwritten diary I use throughout the work day. Over 40 years of diary writings, spread across book shelves or stuffed into boxes stored in attics on two continents... so much fire wood for my funeral pyre.

Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Living Frustration

There is a bug in this software. Our social upbringing creates similar bugs in our psyche. Daily we are tasked to rewrite our own programming or learn to live with our flaws... Thus frustration.