Monday, March 19, 2018

On top of Grandfather Mountain - Thanks Robbie!
Life is all about perspective. I've said that since before I really knew what it meant. Since I was in my early twenties I've believed that the way we perceive situations can determine just how those situations affect us.

It's not always a matter of learning in the moment as some moments grab more of our emotions than our logic, but rather training our brains in a more or less constant manner to react sensibly to whatever happens.

Practice seems to be the only way to get ahead of our emotional reactionary programming. Programming that rarely serves us in the modern era as, no doubt, it must have in wilder times when we were as likely to be hunted as hunters.

With this experience and sometimes hard-won knowledge, I endeavor to rise above emotional reaction and insert logic into the nano-seconds between an event and my emotional reaction to it.


A few poems for ya:

The wind and snow remind me how tenuous life can be as my hands lose feeling and the ice hanging from my eyebrows starts to obscure my vision. My breath is stolen by the ferocity of the wind and I find myself laughing in the face of the storm...laughing at it's brutality that mixes so elegantly with it's beauty. Still defiant. Still alive. Still...


I spoke to the wind of my fears, my dreams, my ideas and my follies. The wind answered back with ancient tales of those who had come before, those who first walked these lands and all those who died doing just that. The wind, it seems, isn't good at small talk.

A fish in a pond is a prisoner. A bird in a cage is a warning. A man in a bottle is invisible to all but himself.