101 in 1001

Self-Experiment #?

I have been inspired by fellow blogger  Three World Chant to create a list of 101 things I will accomplish in 1001 days. I have posted the list on a separate page here. I have been so inspired I started immediately working on the list before it was even finished.

Yesterday I walked a mile and a half at a place I had never been before and took 16 pictures some of which are below. I also got my bike out and started fixing it up and today I got a helmet. I put my car on Craigslist and wrote in my journal. I am still diligently reading 2666 by Robert Bolano which is so intreaguing in a very wierd way, but, also, so very long. I am half way through it. I hope I can finish before it is due at the library. I have another week off to tackle other things on the list. I worked on my novel for 5 hours the other day and will do more tonight. I am off now to clean out my moldy car so I can have people look at it on Sunday. So much time and so little to do. Wait strike that. Reverse it. Pictures from the sculpture garden tucked away in the middle of  a foresty part of a park in the middle of a nice little neighborhood in the middle of our charming little city.

A Failed Experiment: A New Plan

I started out this week intent on focusing on the light and got lost in a dense gray fog of fatigue and indifference ending in a black funk. I have no idea how things happen this way. This all ended with my lovely Mary telling me I had to make a plan for what I was going to do with my life because this isn’t working for anyone. She is, as usual, right, but making long range plans is not one of things I have never been good at. I tend to just take life as it comes, and living out a scripted plan makes me feel like I am on the gray road to the end without surprises or bright spontaneus  flowers of inspiration that bloom by accident on a less planned route. But then I have been thinking that maybe by not planning I have looked at all the possible roads and have spontaneusly moved myself down smaller and smaller roads until I have run up against this dead end. Maybe if I look at a larger map, I can plan a route with the option of taking unplanned turns.

I need to pull back my perspective so I can see the options available to me. For five years I have been working with people myopically focussed on what they can objectively quantify. I know that this is not the only approach to education or life. I have experienced places and people who are not confined to the clinical academic roads that trap life into boxes of jargon and numbers. I need to find a community based on ever opening vistas of human experience and creativity. I need to make a plan that opens out into broad roadless fields and rugged wilderness of unknown adventures. Maybe my plan will be to construct an offroad vehicle that will take me to places I haven’t been before. I have little bits of my mind that I can spare from my work and class focussed brain,  busily nibbling away, gathering bits and pieces, with mouselike energy constructing a plan for such a vehicle. I see the progress in my dreams and my attitude. Today I am full of hope even though I still have to face the almost overwhelming wall of small thinking each day. I have the power of creativity, synthesis, poetry, and the magic language of dreams working tirelessly to make a me sized hole in that wall. I will see the light of a new life of my own making.

What can I do now? That is the question at this point. I can write each day, which I didn’t last week. Writing frames my world in possibilities and allows me to exorcise my dark demons of despair. I need to put ideas into words every day that will at least save a little bit of my sanity until I can devote more time to my escape plan. It keeps the door open just a crack so the light can leak in. It is really impossible to get any quality work done in the dark.

How Do You Know You Are Who You Think You Are?

Are you still the same person you were yesterday or last week or just a subtle changeling? If you lose your reference points in life (relationships, job, home, routine, people who know you) are you still the same person?

It is the feeling you get when you are on vacation in some strange place you haven’t been before, and you meet a person who is completely new to you, but you both totally understand each other. It could happen. Or you quit your job and get a new one and start interacting with a completely new group of people. Are you exactly the same around them as you were with the people you used to work with, or do you shift into a different self? And furthermore does any continuous you or me exist, or is it just an illusion that we are conditioned as members of a certain culture to maintain? I am sure that as a part of a different culture a certain person would behave and react to events differently just as certainly a person when placed in new surroundings and circumstances will change behaviors. Think of people who completely change when they get behind the wheel of a car, or at a party, or in the middle of a battle or intense competition. Which is the continuous person? I often hear people say, “That’s not like him at all!” Maybe it is more like him than the other stuff. I can’t even tell all the time about myself, so how can I know about someone else.

For more on this consult Franz Kafka, Huruki Murakami, Albert Camus among many others.

I am reading Blind Willow Sleeping Woman by Murakami, a collection of 24 short stories many of which deal with these and other questions of our supposed reality, and it is making me think about who I am and what makes me who I am. Very interesting? Maybe not? But I can’t help it. It’s probably just me.

Soaking in the Long Ago Sun

Today, on this cold, wet autumn day, I will sit with my back against the rough bark of the dark tree in the golden light and let the waves of late summer heat flow into me from the past. I will not enter the passage into the room where doors brightly invite me to look for answers. Today, I am a soaker not a seeker. Tomorrow will be a day for exploration and note taking. Today I will close my eyes and feel the day pass without comment.

A Road, A Tree, A Room of Bright Questions

There is a lone tree in the middle of a rolling meadow of amber dry grass next to a dirt road that leads to an old gold rush town in the foothills of California. The tree is a bare black gash in the blue sky of late summer as if the day had been shattered from the other side. The fabric of darkness shows through the crack. Last night I walked into the darkness of that tree that stood in a day twenty years ago and found a passageway that led to circle room with many doors painted in bright colors lit by the sunlight that came gently through a glass ceiling. Each door asked me silent questions about my life. I could not decide which to open first. They were all important questions, but I knew I had time to try each door. It seems I had found the room at just the right moment in my life. As I turned to face each bright door, I was pleasantly thinking that I had built this room here in the middle of my life so long ago and left that lone tree as marker along the dirt road so that I would not miss it. Planning is so important when constructing a life. You just have to figure out how you are going to find the important places when you need them.