thoughts from the beach

[song: star blanket river child by bright black morning light]

Throughout my university career, I learned that life is a delicate, yet at times violent, push and pull between our inner selves and the outside world. Between our emotions and experiences on the one hand and the institutions and methods of communication by which we attempt to stabilize them on the other. Between what we want, and what the world wants for us. 

My first philosophy class taught me of the theory of determinism, this depressing notion that we are only reacting to the world rather than creating it, a lesson which stunned me and left me in an existential crisis. Coming full circle, my last English class taught me that so far as our dreams are real, so long as WE are real, we also must take responsibility for creating the world, or at least the illusion of it... At times when the universe has seemed to spin out of control, out of our hands, it is us and only us that have the free will to take back hold. To make our own path. Maybe it's too ideal to think that everything can change, or maybe it's just seeing the big picture, the fact that nothing stays the same. 

Out of the tension of self and other, inner and outer, nature and institution, we are shaped into being, at times in control and at times left to react to controlling forces. It is in this tension, this indeterminacy, in which truth lies, always fluctuating, revealing itself to us only for a moment before disappearing like a flicker of sunlight caught on a spider web in the wind. 

       [American Gods by Neil Gaiman]

Last summer I picked this flower and put it in my hat. When I came home from my long day at the beach, the flower had wilted, and I asked my mom if she thought it was salvageable. Looking at the sad thing she suggested I should probably just throw it away. I thought about it for a minute, and looked back at her and told her I thought it would live, that I wouldn't give up on it just yet. I put it in my water glass and lulled to sleep. In the morning I opened my eyes to gladly find my flower standing upright in the glass, its petals extended like bursting rays of sunshine. To me it represented the miracle of life, and healing, and the sheer power of belief. For if I had not believed in it my water glass would have been empty, in a physical yet deeply profound sense.