Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Caught in the Muddle

Yet another duality presents itself to you earlier this morning in that lingering state between full wakefulness and coffee,making you wonder if there is somewhere within the human genome a breeding place for emerging dualities.  A primal duality to the human experience is the basic way of life, hunter/gatherer (now revised to Gleaner) or Agriculturalist.

From there, on the way to preparing coffee, removing the grounds from the freezer and packing them into the stove-top espresso maker, came the association of unscripted or opportunistic for the former and scripted for the latter.

Of course hunters and gatherers had to have a global sense of why their prey migrated (usually to follow water sources or because of extremes in weather), and they had to have a pretty tight awareness of where they could find water.  But on a numerical scale, the hunter-gatherer needed to know 1 or 2 in relation to the Agriculturalist's 5 or 6.

By this time, the milk is heating and ready for frothing and the pump action of the coffee maker is sending the delightful pungency of wakefulness into the kitchen, whereupon your thoughts moved along to the observation that a neat duality is to be found in the spontaneous and the control freak.  As with the hunter-gatherers, the spontaneous is not without needs to schedule, to plan, to have anticipations and goals.  But the Samurai Credo seems to articulate this spontaneity:

I make the heavens and earth my parents
I have no home.
I make awareness my home
I have no life and death.
I make the tides of breathing my life and death
I have no divine power.
I make honesty my divine power
I have no means.

I make adaptability to all circumstances my principles
I have no tactics
I make my mind my friend
I have no enemy
I make carelessness my enemy
I have no armour
I make benevolence and righteousness my armour
I have no castle
I make immovable mind my castle
I have no sword
I make absence of self-interest my sword.

Now that the time of the Filofax has morphed into the iPhone and it becomes possible to carry about one's contacts, agendas, and stay in touch via email, Twitter, and Facebook, you are taken with the notion that control has become a major focus of the modern individual, necessitated in some degree because life has become more intense and complex since, say, the Middle Ages, but also because of the choices offered the individual.  One is not always able to benefit directly from the choices he has made, and yet there is the impulse to continue along the path of the choice, say attempting to make the major portion of one's income from things one has written.  A more religious person than you would be likely to say Man proposes and God disposes, whereas you would allow that while Man proposes, Reality disposes.  A more religious person than you would make the equation in which God is Reality and,thus, events planned, accidental, and Beta version are aspects of God.

What you strive for in all things is clarity, which often begins with coffee; it certainly extends to living and writing about living, which for you is story.  It includes relations with animals and relationships with non-animal growing things, and non-animal physical things which may variously shelter you, collapse on you, buoy you or drown you.  Of course there are relationships with people otherwise you would have nothing to write about, no one about whom to think to yourself, she has a cute ass.

The clarity you strive for must originate within you and your visions of the universe in which you live, lit by the lights from distant stars, occasionally clouded over by the clouds of duality.

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