The Year In Retrospect

It's the end of 2019 as I write this. I haven't been able to post on my blog here for a whole year. I was unconcerned about having lost access to being able to write online because I keep a hand-written journal of my thoughts and observations. Now typing these stories, thoughts and impressions etc. has become a chore instead of the pleasure of communicating! So I'm just going to go forward from here...and gradually type up a post here and there, back-dating to when it was written in the past year.

I don't know how much it really matters. When someone doesn't update their blog, it disappears from view and nobody comes to look at it. It appears that not many people tolerate reading as an activity...unless it takes something like seven seconds or less - which I hear is about the attention span of a goldfish. They would rather watch a video than read.

I prefer reading because I can read rapidly; for me it's as if I'm slurping up words as if they are being absorbed directly as if they are my own thoughts. Reading for me is a form of meditation; it's as if the words I'm reading silence the drivel of my own narrative for awhile. What's with the brain doing this "word salad" so constantly? I find myself stretching out the space between the words I'm thinking and it's such a relief when the words come to a halt. Making art contains this sort of relief for me too, as does listening to music. For me, music also has it's own unique shapes and expressions of thinking that goes beyond words, thankfully. That's why I enjoy do much what musicians do as an expression of how they think in the language of music.

I don't always act on what I read, but the ideas soak into me. I find myself in a way "tonguing" about what I read. What I mean is I go over it again and again in terms of judgment about whether I "like" it or not. Instead I look for where these ideas take me later. It's only rarely and much later that I am motivated to make a judgment about what I read.

The movement trajectory of the ideas are what are important to me, where the ideas are "taking me." I take the supposition of what someone has written or communicated, supposing It is absolutely true for them.

In a way, emotional truth has more impact than absolute truth. The way humans remember things has to do with putting it in the context of a story - which is why testimonials are so powerful.

I'm aware how our English language is structured as if we're constantly adding to the pool of absolute truth-with-a-Capitol-"T." Because of the suspicion of the nature of absolute Truth, our job seems to be to determine not if someone else's description of what's going on is believable but how much they are lying - to themselves and to us!

What about the unknown - where everything we learn comes from? 

What's our relationship to that which we don't know yet? 

How can we imagine that everything that's "valid" has already been discovered, described, catalogued and classified?