in every direction

I haven't put anything down to verse in so long, it seems ages. It's evident that I was once possessed a certain poetic zeal that seems to have subsided, or even dissipated. I can be almost sure that it's still there, dormant perhaps. Let's face it, the past couple years have seen such a cathartic release of poems and scribblings, that I might have simply burnt myself out on them. Long have I understood that art in words is not something that can be forced into creation. The poetic intent arises organically, a symbiotic creature in a sense. But where has it been? I used to think in poetry, arranging (or attempting to) my thoughts in verse, but the music of such an expression seems to have quieted in recent months. For nearly 10 years, poems were such an integral part of my continual writing process. Sure I look back in contempt or indifference for a lot of my work, but some I can still read and am incised by their sharp words and culmination of pain and anxiety into structured thought. Maybe that was the journey, maybe that was only a phase over those years to lead me here, into a less abstract state of mind.

To me, poetry's base was always in the abstract, its origin the chaos of the human mind. At times, though, in the very best of the genre, ideas emerge that are quintessential to a sort of basic understanding of our interaction with the world that surrounds us. It puts into words that which eludes us to say because of the brevity of our elaborate consciousness. It grinds down the overwhelming collection of what's in our mind into points that stab with precision in an effort to refine our thinking. All great art does this. The work that is worthwhile is that which illuminates the processes of our existence into the unending panorama of the natural world at large, which we also express in history, science, mathematics, etc. But how often humans simply associate "science" as "nature", when, in fact, science is only our interpretation of these events in nature, as history is the interpretation and analysis of events of the past that have led up to this point, as mathematics is the interpretation of the patterns and design of what we can perceive as our existence. This is, of course, not to say that there is a designer; nature is its own design, a self-fulfilling system.

There is an unfortunate number, however, of people in this world, many in my own country, that choose to believe that nature and our existence cannot possibly be without an external creator. But how could there be a being without being itself? For if god is truly an entity as most of these people believe, there has to have been an origin for such a thing, an origin that supersedes existence itself. To me, that sounds like a total avoidance of the vast majesty of this universe. Instead of simply being in awe and knowing that we are just another blip in macrocosm of time and space, people invented a buffer of sorts to keep that overwhelming status of being completely inconsequential to the universe at bay. There is an understandable fear of being such a small aspect to a system so large, but with the belief that there is an entity that is even greater that, who looks out for us, who created us in his image, who has a set of rules for us, and, most importantly, has imbued us all with a purpose in our lives, makes the frightening possibility that we really are spurious in the face of the totality of existence.

With such a belief, you trade in that intrinsic fear (however unconscious) for obeisance to what you can only imagine in your still evolving head. We are just another small step in the process of life's evolution, a process so vast we can barely understand it. And when people are faced with things they struggle to understand, they often became defensive, and choose to find a protection of sorts to deal with that which they can't comprehend. So instead of attempting to understand the mystery, they become opposed to it, and will follow that which gives them an easy answer, something that doesn't have to let them flounder in possible existential crises. As stated, there is a certain fear of simply being a primate that can talk, living on a giant sphere with other talking primates, spinning around in a dark corner of the galaxy. But is it not that fear that has driven us to greater things than huddling in caves, terrified of the natural world? If we didn't have that fear to overcome, there would have been no need to band together, to learn to communicate, to solve problems, to create tools and harness fire. That fear is just part of the need to survive, possessed by all creatures in some instinctual form. Somewhere along the line, many tens of thousands of years ago, we developed the ability to become aware of that fear and also the faculties to work our way through our inhibitions, to overcome that which could destroy and maim us, were we still the simple primates we started out as. How these abilities came about I doubt there is a real answer for. The power of our frontal lobe in terms of structured thinking and awareness of ourselves is such a unique marvel for humans. The ignorant would call it a "gift from god", but in actuality, it is probably the result of the right collusion of genetics, environment, and time. I don't think we could ever actually discern how this spark of intelligence began to become prevalent in ancient humans' brains, but is it not enough that we simply have it and can utilize it?

It is because of this development that certain groups of early humans were able to migrate from the heart of Africa to nearly every region in the world. I'm in awe to think of tribes making journeys over countless generations to newer and unseen lands, over thousands and thousands of miles, without maps, without written languages, without domesticated animals, without agriculture. How marvelous to think of the epic scope of transformation amongst these people as they dispersed all over the globe, dropping certain physical traits, the genes becoming more specific to the unique tribes, the formation of sounds into language, unifying people even more so into cohesive units. I think of ancient Scandinavians, descending out of the nomadic steppe tribes of Central Asia, who decided to just keep heading North. The impression is that of a group who were not content to stay put but rather to experience what could possibly out there in lands unknown. They had the courage to keep going, all the way to the Arctic circle, so far from equatorial Africa, so far removed from humanity's origin, and they just kept going. I think of those other Central Asian steppe peoples who would go on to found the beginnings of Chinese civilization, arguably the first (certainly in this writer's opinion) while others closely related took similar corridors east, but stayed in the North to resume the nomadic life. People came together after their ancestors traveled for thousands and thousands of miles in possibly as many years in fertile lands in the Wei Valley, wild and unbroken, and began to work together to build what would become society. I won't go into how incredible early Chinese civilization was, how intelligently and creatively they crafted their society. I think of the ancient Polynesians, not satisfied resting in tropical paradises of Indochina, they went further, built simple yet sturdy boats and traversed thousands of miles of treacherous open ocean, to settle across millions of islands, navigating by the stars alone, guided only by wind. Marvelous isn't it? To think how far we have come, to ponder the endeavors of humanity, is absolutely beautiful. The drive to overcome perceived limitations has brought humanity to this point, and it's wondrous to even consider, all the pain, death, strife, and war included in said history. To just have come so far out of cave-dwelling a couple hundred thousand years ago is mind-blowing. A couple hundred thousand years is nothing to the lifetime of this planet, and to have proliferated that much? Now that's miraculous.

"Wonderful where people come from."
-the Preacher, Deadwood