Cognitive Hearth
Where are the places in
the mind planted with the seeds of experience? When this garden
grows, its vines escape, cross over, tangle, entwine with a mental
landscape filled with both beautiful flowers and ugly weeds; planted,
evidently by our personal realities....our personal stories....of
where our lives have been. The writer walks through this garden
taking notes. But ironically perhaps, devoiding oneself from the
"knowing" of this garden makes one appreciate it more.....
like the "uncut block" of the Tao. It's a "forest
for the trees" kind of thing....to really comprehend all
of what it has to offer one must step back and see it from a distance
both in time and space.
This lyric of hope emerged
from a weed tangled era in my life where I personally never thought
I'd ever write another song again. Thus, there is a dichotomy
here not audible in the lyric and the melodic line. This song
about circles, comes out when I feel my life has come to the end
of a line. Personally what's being said for me is somehow linked
to the organic nature of the survival of this garden itself. How
was I to know that I would find meaning, through expressing in
the medium of song, a time when this garden grew nothing but flowers.
Who am I to thank except the one who planted those flowers such
a long time ago.
One Year Later
"...because for me if there's only love my friend, that doesn't
live on, what's living for?"
It is somewhat amazing what the human body can endure. Yet perhaps more so, it is amazing how the material substance of our lives are so tied to the ethereal. My retreat to the darkness of the Arctic last year was the result of a call from within me. I had no clue from whom that voice emanated. I placed no judgment on it. Whether it be from a demon, an angel , or simply, and more likely, just a construct of my mind....my soul, begging for some form of escape from its pain, what did it matter in this reality that proved only to be a fata morgana?
Maybe the solipsist is right......reality is nothing more than what we mentally construct of it..... ultimately defining who we are, where we are, and what of it. Ironically though, in that paradigm, the process to construct that reality has nothing to do with the material substance of life, and everything to do with the mental - ethereal force that makes life go on..... the stuff of the soul. Something unmeasurable by science.
Clearly, the materialists are dumbfounded by the force of the unmeasurable. As I lay in a darkened room in hospital, hooked up to the materialist's machines, the evidence for the scientist is concrete and obvious. But how the damage came to be seems to be a paradox.We watched the machine indicate the arrhythmia and the ticking off of my life in heart beats, now at levels of bradycardia. I ask myself, what's going on here? It's a surrealistic scene. The doctor and I are making small talk about our mutual good old days in Walla Walla, and what use to be the best hamburger joints. I ask him if spending so much time at the old Red Steer drive-in during my younger days has caught up with me. "No." he says, "No Red Steer residue."
More tests, more rationalization, and finally an assumption is given. He speaks in English, but I've heard the words before in the Inuit. "How much ilira have you endured, how much kappia have you encountered?" the doctor asks. Sometimes there is no simple answer for the obvious." "Perlerorneq has its consequences," he states to me, "medically we really don't understand it."
So do I really need to understand it? Perhaps a dose of acceptance is really all that is needed to really heal oneself from the real matter at hand. The solipsist in me is disappointed, I am not making it do this. And with this revelation, suddenly, an odd sense of peace sweeps over me.
Once again the voice calls to me. Is it a demon, an angel? No, it is neither. It judges no one. It sings gently of eternal circles. It knows the spirit of life, it walks in the shadow of death, it speaks through the soul and sings through the heart. It causes me to consider...... what power is there in death........where is its "sting"? Its voice is much stronger now, more clearer than a year ago..... in the darkness of the Arctic.
There is an Inuit word for what I was feeling, ilira, it means to sense awesome fear. It is the kind of fear you feel when you look up into the sky and see the vastness of it all.
This is the fear the Inuit call kappia, the fear you feel when a polar bear is right on your back. And on the horizon another regret emerges.
The Inuit word for it is perlerorneq. It means to sense the weight of life. It is generally associated with the long, cold and dark winters of the Arctic.