why does emotional wreckage haunt us? (i'm always at least a little bit lost.) we move so fast but do we go anywhere? or are we like trees, rooted in our lives. two seeds encompassing separate universes of potential become two trees in separate universes, both uncomplaining subjects of their places in the world, of their microclimates, of shade, sun, elevation, weather, competition for water. they don't get to choose where and when damp soil awakens them any more than apes decide where and when to be born and into what precarious social networks. it's the agony of choice that defeats us moment by moment, the mistaken belief that no roots bind us, that no walls block out the warmth, that the open sky alone determines where our reach meets its limitations. trees feel no grief, no loneliness, no despair. they endure. they live, they grow, they die. they fall, they sift into soil, decay. or are we discrete organisms at all? or are we only entries in a bestiary manufactured by the neural pathways left behind by natural selection, by those primitive shapes that fell one into the other, by those coincidental keys that opened coincidental locks, those streams of particles flowing through the skulls of self-considering apes, electrical entities that can't see backwards into space or time, only inwards, the master originators who declare this pool of signals suffering, enfolding it within a length of judgement, this is wrong, a sin, a fault, or this shall be excused, ignored, elevated into grace. trees make no such distinctions. fill in the spaces between the branches and the tree becomes negative. whatever we are, we exist, we need. one moment of joy, one moment of grief. we pass along the dendritic stream into an unreachable sky. (suffering dislodged from its context is never senseless.)
May 30, 2022
