Gatherer

While you are here, make yourself useful. Instead of leaving no footprints or blazing trails, in place of rooms stacked with forgotten props for making memories and treasuring trivialities of these in trinkets and symbols of some emotion we once had while collecting bones and relics for hanging in closets just in case of a storm. Rather, you could pick up what I have lain down before, it was already here and waiting like this red carpet for barren feet in which you may tip toe so softly so that none notice the shift in shag or bulging pile, the insistence of your presence, the red of your wait makes the earth feel like home for a time.
With you staying longer and nearer, it has made a lasting impression to run fingers over and collect the tips of things to make sense of the things we may feel, like more than necessary for one. 

By Kuroda Seiki (1866-1924) (http://bunka.nii.ac.jp/heritages/detail/252689) [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Too soon?

'You had to be there',

was what we used to say back in the dumb days not quite dark ages, before smartphones and googling.

Now, it is all there, unfaded, in easily reassembled pixels, or virtual memory, clouds.

Both of us, born before Search and Share and compare versions of history, or alternative facts, we can crop and auto-adjust the lighting, or apply filters-for warmth.

It is the way he shows me, pointing down the rabbit hole, we were just bunnies.

He says I will come across these pictures myself in the morning so he should explain.

I prepare for the confession, he is pointing to a collage of She’s, some he has known since high school.

The photo of the old school developing film paper type, a bit blurry some seem hazy with sun,

I squint and see girls, maybe sixteen, all dressed and posed as Cinderella’s, he points and says that party was fun, costumes of trying to look twenty-one. I see these young ladies racing, smiling, at what lie ahead.

He asks if I recognize the birthday girl and I do. The others seem more of interest to he, smiling fondly. 

It was obvious. 

Teen girls wishing to become-and portraying to be-savvy little ladies, married to Mr. Right, looking marvelous and wealthy- now -really--only miserly unfair maidens merely mulling over memories and what could be's, looking strangely silly to me.  

Weren't smartphones supposed to parse us all through this?

Some of the photos were duplicates, I had seen them before. Recently.

I have no photos of myself at that same time, at the same age, the boys did not take pictures back then. And then I am thankful. What an opportunity to forget…a thing of the past.

He still stares at his hands and I see sun spots, in case you were wondering. 

These women all worried the men may forget-what was then, what they looked like in a Kodak moment, when they had unlimited possibilities and poorer photo qualities, sadly they say they see

Then as the Best time, now it is too late. I never went to Pity Parties. 

Lately, he has shown me many, he agrees. He must be hungry for the plumped up past. He enjoys a reheated repast. I am never hungry (for leftovers).

He says, see there’s Me and un-pinches the post to zoom in, close as he can. I see.

That is not where he has been looking. He does not confess, he laughs it off walking away.

Close enough.

Things never were the same. He is googling away. I am deleting photos. 

Painting by Édouard Manet, On the Beach (1873) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Caught in a Web of Cliché’s

I.

Growing up in a small town made me want to travel.

Maybe it was the tall trees that made me believe growing up means moving out of the tree house and not letting roots sink in the same grove.

Then again, maybe it was all that camping as a kid. A taste of the gypsy life.

I have been lost in the woods, more than once metaphorically and twice physically.

Even with this experience under my belt I have wondered how one could successfully achieve getting lost when asked to, it's very difficult to plan. 

This is also sometimes called “running away”.

When I was 13, I boarded a Greyhound bus from Northern California to Colorado alone to see a boy whose family lived in Dot Zero, a decent place to start a life of discovery.

II.

Explorers have no fear of getting lost or of foreign objects nor of mythical creatures. Our imagination is able to create places and things better than reality, which makes it easy to overlook what you are seeking. Marco Polo was disappointed with the unicorn which is why explorers should leave their expectations in their own small towns. 

Explorers and Gypsies are not the same thing, one travels for leisure the other for survival, I forget which is which.

To Explore we are searching, seeking.

To Wander we are finding, discovering.

When one explores, they have plotted expectations and projections onto their mind map.

When one wanders, they discover what could not have been predicted. They find serendipity growing like fungi, strange exotic gems in dark places, like behind eyelids, noticing the smoothest stone and pondering how a rock can resemble a baby's soft cool cheek and not needing an answer from the rattling, gurgling creek. 

Echoes are nothing to fear.

Shadows remind us we are never alone.

III.

Near my desk there is a wooden square piece of art that features the quote, “Not all who wander are lost.”

That sign is everywhere. 

It does not tell one where to go but provides directions.

My step-father never graduated high-school since rock and roll guitar players 'don't need no education'. After battling some sort of “leukemia” or “cancer” and winning, he thinks he is wiser for it, that he was chosen to be stronger than X. 

It sleeps inside his body, he was chosen to finish learning his elementary lessons. 

On my last visit he had read an autobiography of some guitar player like Santana-living vicariously only costs $22.90 (Hardcover)-My stepfather regurgitated to me some profound thought from this book as though it were his own formulation of truth, something like "I may be religiously homeless, but I am spiritually at home" or maybe it was "I may not be religious but my spirituality is sacred," I don't know-each of those are cliché’s that you can hang a priest's robe on. I am not pro (being) found anyway.

In a class I took on Dante I used a paraphrasing of the last cliché about not being religious but my beliefs are sacred (in lieu of the hippie spirituality reference), a classmate called the comment "flap-doodle", I had to look that up. 

Sturgeon's Law applies to everything subject to subjectivity.

IV.

The movie Interstellar  was epic by definition. 

"We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars, now we just look down at our place in the dirt," says Cooper in the movie. 

"When you look up you see very different things than when you look down." Brian Greene noted this astute observation in his book, “The Fabric of the Cosmos”.

Perspective is subjective, Sturgeon's Law applies.

In the bold and daring movie, exploration is emphasized often as a noble goal, although its actually more like a noble gas. Evoking the explorer in us, provoking our inner pioneer, incanting Marco Polo, is laced with a venomous ingredient called "Manifest Destiny", a different type of MSG. 

V.

We just flew by Pluto, a decade too late for it to matter.

We are on our way to Mars to pee on it, put a flag on it, figure out where all that methane is coming from. Here on Earth science has theorized that methane is toxic hot gas, waste in excess, sounds like our type of environment.

VI.

Dark matter is still debated. How will they know when they bump into it? Will it resist or devour or pretend it doesn't care if we are there are here, or not?

Time travel will always be a thing. Travel will always be the thing that yields the highest interest for your time spent. 

Considering how often people dwell in their sweet memories, remembering has become a second home sweet home except the housing is free and everything works out better than anticipated.

Travel nudges us so we can remember how to use all of our five or six senses. 

Wandering is traveling without a destination, wandering is the journey, the view, the experience that takes you from who you were to who you are and possibly who you can become. Infinite paths open.

Of course “not all who wander are lost” but maybe the wanderers are still working on it. 

Looking up at the sky at night it seems like it should be easy to become lost in a sea of expanding infinity, our own atomic volume being relationally a speck of dust in the cosmic thrust of “things”.

Looking down at the “pale blue dot”-seeing pictures from Hubble of our luscious spinning planet amid black space and amidst astronomical violence it seems impossible to become lost on this little encased bubble of paradoxical paradise, the probabilities, the possibilities all seem finite and calculable, reasonable considering the underlying chaos. 

VII.

Looking down, I have seen the forest for the trees. As a frequent traveler among the deep woods, I have learned the architecture, heard the whispers, smelled spring leaps, and touched soft skin that also bleeds.

Looking up, I have seen just beyond what I cannot see, a speck of blue, a hint of the beyond, a sense that I am trapped inside with the trees, rooted and I reach and stretch with them. I have seen the trees for the forest just passing by.

I always stop to wonder why people keep wanting to get discovered, to make discoveries, to pee on planets, prove that dark matter notices us, to reverse or distort the time we created as anatomically correct-

and I have such a hard time getting lost, even in Dot Zero.

A pioneer sees the trees for the forest. 

VIII.

Not to lose perspective but if spacetime travel becomes human practice I see unlimited potential. 

If spacetime travel grows into fruition, the soul mate theory contained in the apple of knowledge just fell on Newton's head, dropping the singularity of the one and only right one dead. I’d hitch a ride on that bus. Kismet will never find me. Maybe I could become invisible, or is that dark matter? Does it matter if no one can see me? I guess it depends on your perspective.

Sometimes spacetime travel is called “running away”(with reality), theoretically.

Conditions are infinitely subject to change. Sturgeon’s Law always applies.

Image By NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute (http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA17171) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. 

Earth is noted by the arrow as seen from Cassini positioned near Saturn.