http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kica8hmSdAM

Some weeks later, I'm browsing YouTube, and I find Derrick's made a follow-up video, after recieving SO MUCH response (the video got Dugg a ba-jillion times on Digg.com). He entitled the video "Why I Support Obama - The Emotional Response". As much as I always keep my cynicism at close range, by the end of this video, I found myself a little choked up. He managed to put into words my own feelings about what I want most for America. Go Derrick. Good on ya.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2zO5d-XZWA

Anyway. Felt compelled to post some thoughts. I've been a little quite on Xanga since all my comments were deleted and Xanga stopped talking to me about it. I haven't moved on yet... not fully, so... there you go.

• The Assault on Reason - Al Gore
• The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama
• The Measure of a Man - Sidney Poitier
• Buddha's Teachings - Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai
  

SIMPLICITY
THE FATHER OF INTENTION

"Tis a gift to be simple, tis' a gift to be free,
Tis a gift to come 'round where we ought to be.
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
t'will be in the valley of love and delight."
~ Shaker's Hymn

"What would happen," you began asking me... "if someone had transplanted your mind into the body of a hummingbird?"

"Aside from being a very messy and overall unsatisfying ordeal?" I asked.

"Come on. You're not playing the game right," you quipped back. In those last two days, you'd detailed to me a world that had dissolved into a series of metaphors. You were describing a series of days you'd experienced sometime in the past, that had been dominated inexplicably by a series of raw, undiluted possibilities the nature of which you couldn't fathom. As each new day had struck, you were faced with a brand new emanation, and invariably... so far at least... felt your life profoundly impacted by that unflinching, unshakeably idealistic intention. You'd caught me reflecting on what you'd said up until now, and tapped your glass sharply with your spoon.

"Mind... hummingbird... Seriously."

"Right, right." I said. "I take it, you mean... because a hummingbird has the fastest metabolism of any animal on the planet." I remembered reading that a hummingbird could flap its wings 80 times a second, and that... in contrast to the average human heartrate of 60 to maybe 100 beats per minute... a hummingbird's heart might beat as high as 1,260 times in that same minute... almost 16 times as fast. You knew my preoccupation with useless trivia like this, so I tried not to take the bait too quickly, geeking out to your suggestions of mad science. In spite of that resistance however, I found my curiosity piqued.

"If such a thing were possible," you said... "--imagine how the world might seem to you."

"You mean, everything would seem fast?" I asked, finally giving in. "No. Exactly the opposite. From your perspective... everything would move incredibly slowly." You went on to explain that this was exactly what you awoke to that next day. It wasn't really like you'd gained superpowers or anything, but you described a world in which time didn't seem as persistant a hound, nipping at your heels. You spent the first part of that morning trying desperately to figure out which possibility might have this effect in your life, making things seem so surreal.

When your eyes first opened, it wasn't really a sound so much as music was the closest thing you could relate to the feeling of connection. You exercised and there was a concerto, your body being the solo instrument against an orchestra of adrenalyn. The experience seemed to focus your attention on any task at hand, making the mundane into a masterpiece. As you walked from your bedroom, an adagio played and your thoughts collected with each footstep. Somewhere, your mind wanted to race through the millions of stray thoughts available, but the various melodies kept things effortlessly in tempo, your preparations for breakfast segueing into your mornings' ablutions. With every change of venue accompanied by its own leitmotiv, it was almost as if this day had become some internal rendition of Peter and the Wolf.

"Reminds me of that Disney film with all the music..." I said, smiling across the table.

"What, Fantasia? Trust me, if hallucinations of dancing brooms and prancing centaurs had accompanied all of this, I'd have immediately checked into the emergency room."

"Had you figured out the possibility?"

"Simplicity" you said looking up from your coffee which, from your sour expression, had gone a bit cold. This day, you had been experiencing the possibility of simplicity. It had taken some time before you recognized it. In the presence of simplicity fast became slow and chaos became consequence. You found yourself doing a series of broad strokes in the short time before you left for work. Even while you made mental notes to sort through them later, your hands emptied the various counters and shelves of your apartment of their various occupants. Where relocation wasn't practical, these items piled into a series of plastic bags you then consigned to your basement.

You moved from room to room, assessing and operating with the intentionality of a conductor, orchestrating a symphony of serenity by reducing your environment to its most basic nature. By the end of your rounds, you'd packed nearly 10 bags, pausing only slightly to separate clothes from paperwork, and the vitally important from those items you knew weren't immediately necessary to find. You felt your own curiosity ignored, as if your body were sorting through someone else's things, pausing only long enough to rifle through your memory for the most rudimentary identification. When it was all complete, you stood, looking around at a process that while taking only 45 minutes... had transformed your living space into an impossibly basic collection of furniture, bare necessities and empty surfaces. When you realize you weren't breathing, you took a sharp inhale of air, only to notice that halted quality to it that usually signally some deeply emotional episode. Across the expanse of empty space, echoing through the void was something like a soft ritornello , that recurring passage of music that gave this whole crazy experience unity and form. Before you drove off to work, the contents of your car found themselves caught in a tornado, its tail depositing the many contents into another labeled bag. While you knew it was still simplicity, the rampant emptiness that was flooding into your life brought on recurring thoughts of opportunity... as if everything around you began to call out with unrealised potential. Like riding the crest of a wave however, there was irony in that holding that open, unadorned space, was far more powerful and invigorating that giving into it.

Throughout your day, the beat went on. Your world had been imprinted with a rhythm you'd never before been able to notice. Even in the midst of conversations, you found yourself listening far more than talking, simply to enjoy the unknowing performance of each speaker. As if participants in your own private recital, you listened to each of them with an intensity that even they seemed to feel. When the speaker was focused and clear, regardless of the message (the woman from accounting explaining why she needed to borrow your stapler for the next 2 days was almost poetic), you felt that swell of triumph as the soloist departed the stage. You also felt a deep empathy for those that struggled to play, from bad notes, to passages that degraded into the equivalent of mashed keys. That empathy often prompted you to say a few words of encouragement, based on those struggling notes you could tell they yearned to play. The recovery was often tentative and muted, but on occasion the performance returned to an amazingly strong finish that regardless of the actual message, almost forced you to your feet with applause.

"Which... of course would have been awkward," you laughed. Not just once, did someone comment on the warmth and attention you showed to them, even when you were forced to wrap the conversation and return to your other responsibilities. Amazingly, even your more malevolent visitors were met by a strange indifference. "Did they succeed in intimidating me today?" you thought wrly from beyond the veil. Like playing a role, you heard yourself chiming in to help their agenda along. "Sorry, I didn't realize that was such a problem. I'll do better next time, okay?" It didn't matter that the gripe was nonsense, and that your tone of contrition seemed an injustice, you let the movement follow-through, and through it seemed to markedly change the quality of the day by its pragmatism and economy of words.

In this way, you thought, it didn't seem like the usual assault of daily invaders, hellbent on making your day more complicated. Instead, they were all gifts, and getting away wasn't a reward, but a movement from one enjoyment to another with the only real structure being to fulfill the promises and agreements you'd made to supervisors and company clients. Incomplete tasks, you felt, were interrupted renditions for which you desperately wanted to hear the ending. "Ode to joy" stopped during its tender opening or "Beethoven's Fifth" cut off at the knees, while approaching into its magnificent conclusion.

Driving home, you "listened" for those items still caught on their last note, and those still waiting to begin. Your thought were not churning over the details as they usually did, but simply making short observations about the unattended thoughts that hung in wait. During your evening run, your mind remained present to the world around you. Every tree you passed, the smell of the heavy wooden bridge damp with an earlier shower during the day, the sound of cars driving by, and birds talking to one another. Everything today seemed to be an excitement of being in the moment, and appreciating it for what it was. Time moved slower, you realized, because it wasn't compressed with its usual battery of thoughts, vying for attention during every moment. When you gave something your attention, it was nearly full and undiluted... the real you, and always present, always listening self that you realized was never usually "all there".

You finished your assorted tasks for the day, and felt an emotional pang of expectation hit you as you lay in your bed. You were staring into the darkness above, and thinking about the three possibilities you'd so far encountered. Responsibility, Integrity, and Simplicity. Integrity helped you clean up your past, unlocking the chains you never realized had held you back. Responsibility helped correct your present, respecting those things that exist here and now, everyday... Both insured that your "wheel" was solid, and had the potential to maintain those bursts of energy that added to your life's momentum, now free and unfettered. Now, you thought... you saw simplicity for what it truly was. It guarded your future.

Before you, a series of options came more steadily into focus, unclouded by the normal busyness that had before invaded your peace of mind. True, all of those bags would need to be tended, but you looked forward to getting to them one by one. You'd heard it said that if you go a year without missing an item that has been packed away, you might considering throwing it away sight unseen. So noted.

Had these things now allowed you to master your past, present and future? If so, what could possibly come next? Before your mind became enveloped in a fit of its usual patterns, you suddenly felt the question was unnecessary. Tomorrow would come soon enough.

To Be Continued...