We Are Making History

Posted on January 17, 2011 by randomyriad

“Quantum physics tells us that no matter how thorough our observation of the present, the (unobserved) past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities. The universe according to quantum physics, has no single past, or history. We create history by our observation, rather than history creating us.”

Stephen Hawking


We have to remember that what we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our methods of questioning.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

What kind of rear view mirror are you using? If the past is your memories and interpretations of observations made by others of where we’ve been and how we got here, then the tool through which you observe, measure, or relive these events can change history for you and therefore have profound affects on who you are now and who you will be. That is if you have any say in the matter. Which I just assume is the case since if I don’t then why the hell am I working so hard.

Posted in All part of the process, change, make your own world, mindworks, Other peoples words, paying attention, philosophy, Questions and riddles, thinking in words, time travel | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Mississippi Mind Map

Posted on January 16, 2011 by randomyriad
Minter City, Mississippi location map; created...

Image via Wikipedia

This is a little bit of an idea I put together for Pieces of the Mirror, my, as yet unfinished, collection of puzzled prose I was writing in the summer of 2008. It somehow did not get posted, or was deleted accidentally. I recently came across it while I was transferring my writing from my computer to my new laptop. I could not find it on my blog, and so decided to post it now.

I often feel the way I did then in these times of trying to write in between work, commutes and other parts of life that need my presence, like I am chugging on my way to the next idea on less than optimum roads through often unfamiliar territory.

 

 

 

 

 

 


Lately my ideas are scattered like small towns in Mississippi of over 50 years ago. Each one connected with some small rural highway running through a landscape of farms and little woodland patches all warm and humid, and my consciousness is like an old pick-up truck backfiring its way in a circuitous route trying in a lazy way to connect them. When my pick-up stops in a sigh of dust and exhaust at some broken down gas station of an idea, my consciousness will get out and converse in slow southern tones casually with the old man who runs the ancient pump that will give my mental vehicle fuel to rumble on down that bumpy mostly paved randomly numbered route to my next idea. I am not in any hurry. Things just are not developing that quickly in my mind that I would need a super highway or a bullet train. Maybe my mental pace will advance into the 21st century soon, but for the time being I’ll be moving on the faint gray lines in between the tiny dots somewhere around the Gulf of Mexico and to the east that big river that flows from out of the great open plains down into the bayou country. Maybe thats where my mind is headed. Maybe next week I will be stranded somewhere in the night, bald tires mired 2 feet in the mud on a back road next to a bayou with not a phone in sight. I just can’t say for sure. Maybe I will drive over the long bridge into the 21st century and take a plane to somewhere I have heard of and my ideas will come tumbling into a melting pot city, converging into epiphanies of light and activity that never sleep. Right now I find myself just outside of Minter City (that name sounds familiar) near the Yazoo River and my gas gauge needle is in the red. I guess I’ll mosey in and see what this place has to offer a mental traveler on a warm Sunday morning sometime in the middle of the previous century, maybe a little prayer and a song and church coffee. Sounds good right about now. I think I will just stick to the river road after that. Maybe I could make Yazoo City by sunset.

Posted in All part of the process, conversations, internal landscape, mindworks, my life, Of the Road and The River, paying attention, pieces of the mirror, Telling Stories, thinking in words, time travel, whereever you go there you are, Word play, working world | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

An Inspired Life is Hard On the Nerves

Posted on January 15, 2011 by randomyriad

Each moment is a place you’ve never been– Mark Strand

(an idea taken from a conversation with a friend about a difficult situation that made us both stronger)

It is difficult to get through an inspired life without making messes along the way. I hope none of us who have any passion for creative endeavor of any kind give up on inspiration because he or she loses the ability to deal with a little chaos every now and then. Chaos is often good for the soul, even if it is hard on the nerves. Nerves will recover to be shaken again. The soul is what we count on to keep us truly living.

At the place of uncertainty, in the presence of mystery, faced with doubt, after all the towers of sand have fallen, that is where a truly creative person sees the mess as raw material for a new project, and begins to piece a new puzzle from the old pieces. Nothing is completely new and or completely lost. So much more is possible than we can see from the scene of disaster. That is the time to make a beginning of a new work. Only by moving, gathering and building can we get to a place where the jumble of the present moment starts to make some sense. We must not stop after the collapse, crying in a heap of regret. Mourning must pass. Only by moving and gathering up the useful bits can we see what we have learned.

So how do we teach our children with prepackaged units and step by step instruction that is cleaned up and sterilized, to be creative thinkers? We must allow them to make mistakes and look at the mess. The trick is to do it so they don’t hurt or maim themselves in the process. That is a hard balance to make. We want our children to be safe and pain free, but they need experiences that might be a little scary for us and them in order to deal with the chaos of the world and be able to move forward through uncertainties with some confidence of figuring things out in the end.

Posted in All part of the process, change, conversations, discovery and recovery, mindworks, my life, Other peoples words, paying attention, philosophy, Teaching and Learning, the end is the beginning, thinking in words | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Icy Determination to Thoughtful Action

Posted on January 14, 2011 by randomyriad

“We must resist the populist temptation to act out of anger and thus wound ourselves. Instead of such impotent acting out, we should control our fury and transform it into icy determination to think things through in a really radical way, and to ask what kind of society it is that renders such blackmail possible.”– Slavoj Zizek

He is speaking about the bailing out of wall street here and the blackmail that giant corporations that are too big to fail perpetrated, but it seems to fit also when you think about how our country has been held hostage by demonizing rhetoric (as well as the NRA), and its possible affects on the minds of the ultra-radicals of any persuasion, including the mentally unstable, who are, in this country, free to own and carry guns in most places as long as they have a permit. We must use sanity against insanity, knowledge against ignorance, and reasonable discourse against violence laced metaphors that give license to the impetuous and unhinged to act impetuously. We must act, but only in ways that increase the likelihood of people gaining stability not losing it through fear.

Posted in All part of the process, change, make your own world, Other peoples words, paying attention, philosophy, Questions and riddles, thinking in words | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Year in Review: December 2010

Posted on January 13, 2011 by randomyriad

I

What Happened, What I Wrote, And What I Read

December 7

Journal Entry:

Every day is packed full. Now the wind starts. Yesterday evening I was so tired and negative, all was black and bleak. Tonight I am feeling fine even though I got the bad news that I will not be able to use vacation pay to supplement my 3 weeks of leave.

Raemi and I planned our next parent night. We worked out the weeks staffing, and I had a good conference with parents. I was also able to finish documentation on our big map project. Oh yeah! and do the most of the laundry. I was awesome.

December 12

Quote:

An old fire will make a dark husk for itself and settle into the middle– Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Journal Entry:

There is no night here uninterrupted by the sound of machines moving.

December 15

Journal Entry:

My mind is b0roughing furiously into itself, trying to find a framework to express the layers of reality.

December 17

Journal Entry:

I am digging up old work and putting it out furiously on paper always digging.

December 19

Journal Entry:

How long will it take me to fill in this notebook (my new journal), maybe not too long if I write daily. I think handwriting is a different way of thinking, a little slower than typing. In some way my mind works to the rhythm with all this room to write in.

Mary is stressed, but dealing with her new job which has not started except in her mind which is always full of plans, amazing plans for our future. I just go from day to day like a monkey in a tree never thinking beyond the next banana. She is often 3 trees ahead and what about next year.


The minutes feel full to bursting while I work at my desk, music, words, ideas, images, the thought of new music and words. I am reading the Reefs of Earth by R. A. Lafferty and will start Summerland by Michael Chabon soon. I listened to Mahler‘s 8th symphony, mostly beautiful and complex, at times transcendent and ethereal. It has a lot of chorale and vocal sections, but most of that fits so nicely with the instrumentation. The voices are instruments. Words are sounds, especially since they are in German and so meaningless to me.

December 23

Journal Entry:

I am living inside myself. How do I get out?

I edited and rearranged Pieces of the Mirror (some of my mostly unread unfinished works).

There have been times when I naturally connected with people and made them part of my life. I wonder if that is possible anymore. My life flows, moves in a song. I do not sell or steer too much.

December 25

Journal Entry:

Christmas with our children. We played Apples to Apples, listened to I pod music and Jordan provided helicopter antics. What a pleasant and laid back day.

December 26

Journal Entry:

Everybody came to our house, after a stressful preparation. Mary gets wound up, finally is OK, and I am so clueless sometimes (misunderstand and just space out). Mom and Dad were late as usual.

December 29 and into the new year

I went back to work today, and in the middle of organizing my classroom, I was called into the office and confronted with an allegation of child abuse by one of my clients. I was baffled and in shock. Then my director came and told me she had faith in me, but she had to put me on administrative leave with pay until the investigation was over. I spent 3 long days on administrative leave. I was not too fearful. I was just anxious to be there with my colleagues starting the new quarter with my class. I am so thankful for the emotional and administrative support I got during this ordeal. It made a huge difference in my attitude.

December 30

Journal Entry:

1. Reality is surprising. You can’t guess what is going to happen, my director asking me to come to her office as my day was finishing up and while there finding out that I have been implicated in an incident of abuse.  I couldn’t have come up with that in my imagination.

2. Finding a sense of history, a sense that what happens in the story is connected to a broader world and series of cultural and historical events and movements.

3. Connected to who I am and how my mind puts things together. Sense of humor and theories of space and time, dreams and confusions that make the story more real.

4. Many voices, angles: not just one narrator or approach to the material.
December 31

Journal Entry:

I am looking over the year and feeling vaguely positive in the face of obstacles.

Resolutions:

1. Be productive every day: Do something that carries over to following days.

2. Keep a positive attitude while paying honest attention to what is going on in my life.

3. Appreciate what I have and seek to make a positive difference for the people I have contact with each day.


II

Conclusion: The End is the Beginning

The beginning of last month already seems so distant. I have gone through some monumental changes in perspective and gained a new attitude toward writing, my work and my life. I feel that I am a writer now and really know that no matter what I must write everyday, even if that means scribbling some ideas in a journal I keep in my pocket. The act of pushing thoughts into words makes my mind work in a more positive way.  In this coming year I intend to post at least once a day on my blog, and keep ideas in store so that I have material to draw on. I hope to finish a draft of another novel and finish some short stories, and of course poems will happen every now and then. I am excited about a year of writing. I hope some of my (most likely imaginary) handful of readers will stick with me through the adventure and chaos of another year.

Posted in All part of the process, can't really complain but, change, Check this out, developing relationships, discovery and recovery, Dreamtime, Family, Fiction, lists, mindworks, my life, Other peoples words, paying attention, personal history, playing games, Questions and riddles, Teaching and Learning, Telling Stories, the end is the beginning, thinking in words, time travel, winter, working world | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment