Each of us have our own

strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes they are the same thing, but only if we forget what different used to mean, and we have. In my mind I want to know; what does it mean to be close to another person? Is it an illusion? Is it just a feeling? Is it a possibility? An inevitability? Can it be understood even a little? I don't even know how to approach this problem, how to ask questions about it. That complete confusion is a strength. And a weakness. In that understanding something about something means not understanding something else about it. The productive extreme position of unknowingness re the distance of others is made possible by the weakness of wanting to be alone, which is a strength too. People who are far away in yellow windows exert a strong pressure in the imagination. People whose breath lies on your neck are weak as statues, weak as dream diaries, weak as copy for publication. Weak as a flame that burns at cold room temperature, which is strong in that the whole world is flammable to it. Weak as mirrors are selves who move in perfect reversal in front of you, while strong ideas about self come from those who move least similarly, but these selves are others, and when you move into them you become an other, but you are still yourself. (It's simple kids - try it at home!) You can move into trees and flames and rocks and traffic flow as can a drink of water and vitamin pills move into you and then seem to know your best moves. And you can fade somewhat if you relax, and you can blend the slightest bit at the edges, but not like a person out of the sweet spot of focal distance in a photo. Not like that.

At this point we can ask ourselves, if the new physics of suchness makes more sense when informed by an animistic, pantheistic paganism than a self-centered autocratic omnipotent Jehovaism, then how can we change our analogies? One thing to remember is that each god is omnipotent but sharing in the way that the great god of all the oceans is all-powerful although there are also all-powerful gods of each sea, each inlet, each strange miniature canyon carved into the rock, and this last god is also great (although not the last). Indeed each wave has its own god and these gods move through the sea-god's being for a short rule, and yet the sea god rules himself. And each wave-god crashes against the line of pebble-gods and meets the god of short-lived thin white foam, and the god of undertow pulling legs out to sea, and the god of short-lived intersecting triangles in the sand, and the god of infinite sunsparkles still in each moment, and the god of daylong whiteglowing curlique tracer lines of each sparkle's path, and the god of the place where the sandy-green water turns dark blue (although it is an illusion). And then, though the wave is gone, the god is there still. And as each wave has a god, there is a god of waves and each knows only a tiny domain, yet is the final word in it.

In this way the tree that forks early in its trunk will reach high into the sky through two complimentary paths but even in its most extreme terminals will not produce leaves that cover eachother's access to the sunlight. In this way too, two slender outlying branches of the tree being tossed in the rough prestorm wind can clatter and rub against each other without knowing that they are one in body, that their rhythm is a product of vectors of strenth and flexibility within thousands of repetitions of their own forking selves. And in this way the walk at night reveals the appearance of light and shadow to be only a game for a strange and predetermined dialogue of divination that plays equally through the flat-projected quiver of the winter trees, flickering streetlights and the walker's mind in which the inky depths hold all histories of fear and danger and each particularly laid out glowing shape holds all possibility of hope and love. And conversely light holds fear of overexposure and darkness holds the comfort of invisibilty, and time moves backwards and forwards threading all possibilities through each needle-eye moment to compensate for the starburst of contradictions.

I promise I will dream of humilty but I have a thousand things to learn. I'm trying to gather these short-circuit sparks together to get this bulb burning pure, but I'm not sure how. Remember the rotting soldiers in their poison-filled mudpits and the softies on their satyricon sofas and say "good night, this is more entertaining than tv and less certain than thinking these things out myself." Good night!

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It's 2008 all over again!