Wings to a Distant Land

Short trips to places I've seen before, I believe may be under rated. There is always a chance to find something new, a chance to connect with those once nearer to home and heart. We wandered through mountains, around steep slops and through slices of rock, covered in frozen flows. Old faces were restored to memory and new faces were scrawled in, as I met new people and dined with old. I sampled real Ethiopian food for the first time, and it was absolutely amazing. Few things I've tasted can compare. I also had Thai and Indian, but was not nearly as blown away. We had wine and various cheeses over an interesting board game, Thurn and Taxis. The group attempted to bowl, but found complications in the midst, and returned to the party grounds to indulge more in snacks and conversation. The nights rolled on and exciting times I could not have predicted were upon us. Back at our weekend lodging I found a copy of Mirror's Edge, which I think I might nominate as one of my favorite games, and certainly one of the best games made recently. I played it almost non-stop and finished it in three sittings. I turned a new friend on to Final Fantasy Tactics, and now that's got me playing it, as well. And so I tied up my trip with Lamb Gyro and some lite reading on the return journey, but I spent most of the time just gazing at the road. So much world to see, and so often we are just too distracted. Such a shame.

Poetry Exchange: 01-16-09

"Frozen Falls and Empty Halls litter the world around us, shocked by the wave and abandoned by the blaze. A million tiny paths so taunt and brittle shatter at the lightest touch, as if merely coming near could make them explode. Clouds are cast and the world loses all trace of color as it slides into a scene unmarked by those things that give us comfort, and we are left wondering how much longer we are forced to edge through this wasteland." - Nicholas Doyle, 2009

"In this wasteland we search for the frail trace of warmth and compassion always seeming just out of our reach. It was found once only to have let it slip through our hands like light fleeting from an ever growing darkness. It eludes us only to show its face long enough for us to have the yearning again. The wandering, the wondering; are they the same?" - Andrea Senter, 2009

An e-mail best unsent.

"Oh my god. I am losing it. I am getting this perceptual distortion in which my consciousness is lagging behind my senses, so I experience everything before I am aware of it, and it gives this sense of seeing the future. I know everything I am about to do before I KNOW that I have thought about it. Do you understand? Stay up for a few days, maybe you will then. It is making me a little sick. It is kind of like intense, unending deja vu. I have edited these cat pictures before. I have seen the sun spilling on to my maps from this exact angle. I have written this e-mail before...time and I again. I have not even been up for 24 hours! What is wrong here!? This paragraph...it is the one from that...that vision I had earlier. This is what I was thinking about....but it still doesn't make sense."

Infinite Midnight

Hours turn to days as I slip through this, but the days are without day, for I see nothing but darkness. I rise to the absence of life giving light, to be greeted only by fragments and reflections. I fall before I can catch a glimpse of the pure thing, and it has been so long that I begin to question if it was ever really there at all, or if we have always wandered in twilight, and that we only dream of daytime as something magical and unreal, something we wish for. Here I am, stumbling through infinite midnight, welcomed to a world I once knew, and my have never known anything but. Come to darkness, they chant...but were we not born to it?

I appreciate the distraction.

Thank you for what you've done. It really has been kind of you to give what you have to give, and I really enjoyed it, for I thought it was what I wanted. But, time does not stand still, and the instants we once held are fleeting fast, and as they fade, so too does our break from reality. Those images cling to the barriers we didn't know we built, and while in place, they make them dissolve. The luxury this grants is a painless path to knowing what the world truly has in store for you...and it tells me that it is not this. Thanks for the nudge, I know which way to go now.

And there is nowhere in this universe to hide...

A new year, time shifting and realigning, a chance to reposition itself, a chance for all of us to coordinate. We set aside this time for a promise of change. 'This year, it will be different', 'This year, I'm going to do (this)'. Do we really need a calendar to guide us? Do we truly need mathematical time to control us? I've walked for nights and slept for days, felt the pulse of the world at strange hours, met new people and said new things in the space one might not expect. I tell you, every moment is a chance for something new, something incredible - desire is the essence of being, the drive that takes us to new heights. Desire...it is the things that shifts worlds and makes our breaks realities. So, let us first start by finding what we truly desire...and then, we can set that desire to time, and time can create for us a projection, our own calendar. That way, my friends, time will be on our side. We shall be in control, for nothing is more powerful than a person with conviction - a person that knows exactly what he or she wants, and isn't willing to stop trying. It is in that, which we are given a real beginning, and a chance to create new beginnings. So when you stand at the fated hour, will you ask yourself "What will I do with this year?" Nay; You ask yourself : What shall I do with this lifetime? What shall I do...Now?