Confluences I

Confluences I

(Rather than continue with themes I will post a series called confluences followed by a Roman numeral that will go with the flow and confluence of ideas without a necessary division of the stream per post. Thus a set of ideas, as well the direction of flow of influence, are put into separate items as the issue come up to which the context will connect the branching and parallels in the flow.)

L. Edgar Otto   18 February, 2013

Nature herself must dream, as does the dust, its dance with imagination in the village by the bend to which our short stay knows not what came before or after the creative rivers of time - if indeed no matter how far we may explore them, they exist.

Great murals are painted and bronze road signs that the researchers were there, the village now a great city, the halls of a great university recall of those who sifted the gold in the river to aid spring fill and measure the flood plane that the crops might better grow, irradiation more than our basking in the sunlight that makes fixed the furrows, plowed wrinkles of our skin in stored sunlight, simple diseases vanish as our lamps change the milk and honey itself.  Biology more complex than the chemistry and physics. 

Like the faces in the School of Athens, some forgotten,  these modeled by the artists and scientists of their time seen truly or in jest our imagined faces of legend and prophesy.  But the dream of dust diviners rarely leaks to the work-a-day

hunters and gatherers, thieves and lovers, the lore of shamans some trick or rule evoking faith by lies as much as common sense, and grandmothers passed down like the algae blooms, season spawns, and breaking ice catastrophes if too close from our childhood teeming origin and estuary or too far from mysterious cross-eyed many gear of tides spiraling in the storms and hidden spinning spirals in the sea that some with child or in bonds are each others help mates that seek higher ground, sometimes too far from confluences that they too become but dry dreams in isolation.  Their faces endure in such dreams as surely as the children are trapped in their minds and bodies by the chance yet hopeful alloy of the best and worst of their parents each lost yet one stream of such confluences of dreams.

If the dust from some remote unity as a theory of being can mimic the flow reversed and no twists or cycles endure for long, or if in the flow the world changes slowly beyond recognition even of our own myths or returns to who we were; if it in a sense is the science of heat where their is no heat, of motion where at the foundations as if perpetual it is all we can do to slow something down in its timeless light, then dream has too its wet and dry seasons, the great rain forests build on shallow soil as if a symbiote or parasite on the rise and fall of oceans in the very long dynamic past.

Before your eyes the snapshot and panorama, before your heart a record of the eternal moment and yet when the images meet us in the flesh, the gods with us for a little while and we rising above the water line drowning along with written life flashing before and after us we sense as we view the fading photograph and light of stars from long ago we taste in our now not knowing their present fate, startled perhaps the actors in the play seem so much alive but have vanished into a distant age where all return as sorrowful ghosts and their desire to do the work gone with forgotten fame.

So much our eyes try to behold the soul of ourselves in the reflection in the fun-house or still pond surface mirror water as if life in this flow can be aware, even if in the cones of sound amplified, or stray light focused from the sun, we find on its own skin a mote of light hotter than its mighty self.  It not enough an achievement in sight or architecture to stand the Euclidean plane on end to declare it a towering spaceship dock or heaven called by the spinning world to the North Star in flight from the fall off of some serpent filled edge of the seas. 

We have not made such higher achievements yet more than our blurry half solid edifices.  Nor have we found among us, or even unto the gods, what could one day prove the deepest goal among all of them such first to some degree as all there is, all taken in imperfections loved as much as things not missed, higher love not seen yet in this world but the substance of the world and sure center.  Love that is the source of light itself, light seen that we are not in love blind, that it needs mystery to be real, enhanced by hallucinations and pomp and circumstance, nor in trials and obstacles the omega point reached as love absolute and without conditions in first sight or retrospect some chance fallen of the myriad of seeds into unique flourishing virgin soil- I speak of love far beyond that, beyond equifinality of our rage against or accepting things working our in the end if we survive the wishes and the struggle.

No matter to what great icon we make for our lesser explorers that seem laughable in there glory of a past and simpler day- these had their place in the long climb and great lottery of life so far away upstream - if we miss the dream then we have missed what we are and may achieve in life.  We have but glimpsed into each others better hearts where alone or naked to the view of the world or gods or each other, we have seen and touched outside the theories by our sentience in dreams to which sometimes we see truly beyond all confluences of time.

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Confluence I -  The confluence of creative streams of time meet at the bends and oxbows that dust and deltas dream, Nature in isolation if a dry bed...

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