Feb 11, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries, Reading, Writing, Thinking, Teaching and Learning

Words create an alternate reality.

This is how we re-create our passing seconds, minutes, hours, years.  Forever sloughing off our past selves, we clutch at a memory of what we thought we were, and re-build it lovingly, hoping to freeze-frame it.  How much of it is Platonically real?

I like it, though.

My worded reality offers more nuance, or a more ordered, less chaotic, more neatly arranged nuance to the setting of my days.

We all know this secret — life truly has no meaning.  Life’s meaning is always sculpted by us, its artisans.

So, today went by.  There was some work, some food, some musing, some sledding with daughter, some lazing, some blogging, and now, in a few minutes, more work.  Soon, there will be some music together, some hugs and kisses, daughter’s bedtime, and more work before we retire for the night.

So, it will go.  And I will have not much to show for it, except memories which will be overlaid with more memories, and this, the sum of my day today.

It was fun while it lasted.

If I didn’t want to have a Hindu death ceremony at the end of my life (many decades from now, don’t worry!) I would opt, instead, for a grave, on which would be inscribed this epitaph: Yes, it was fun while it lasted.

Tags: alternate reality, Epitaph, reality, the meaning of life

Feb 10, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries

I am fascinated by angles and curves.  (Why was the realm of mathematics such a closed book to me when I was an eighth-grader, bored and maddened by all things mathematical made mundane by well-meaning, but muttering teachers?)

Pythagoras’ theorem and the puzzle of Pi (can’t get the symbol on this thing) enchanted me, always.  I understood both, but couldn’t for the life of me figure out how those Greek cats got to both core understandings.

Then, I come downstairs to re-heat some coffee and cudgel my brain into some semblance of alertness, and what do I see on the dining table?  A book on mathematical reasoning left there by my husband, with a page opened to my very favorite topics in geometry!

It really is all about squaring the circle — so magical!

Somewhere out there is a perfect place, a folded space that contains every shape and non-shape, every number and non-number, every sound and all silence, every color and non-color.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was Circle.  In ever-widening circles, we swim upwards towards a blind understanding of our earth-bound selves.  And we reach for the radius that will spin us around our galactic core, and we hold on desperately, inching towards that still point, the centre of it all.

Ah, that was one good cup of coffee!  Smack!

Tags: #Poetry, coffee, folded space, mathematics, pythagoras, squaring the circle