Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Keys to The Kingdom




We seldom can see everything at once. We take things in briefly, training on specifics. The horizon, with Denman Island, was my focus. For another, I knew, it would be the foreground of Qualicum Beach. For someone else, it would be the dancing flowers in my camera lens. Without your seeing my picture, how could you possibly find the keys to my meaning? We each make metaphors of our lives, turning the past into symbolism, significance, and perspective. But seldom do we see everything. In retrospect, or when viewing an image again, one may notice something altogether missed, (as did I, recently, when taking the photo (above), more than a week or so ago.)

The key to an effective composition lies in the rule of three. The key to another’s heart lies in treasuring not only the lock, but how to open it. The keys to the kingdom lie in the phrases passed down through history. The key to mankind lies in his ability to marry with her kind too. We are inundated with keys. We carry them like jingle bells, each opening a portal to the new present. And sometimes, oft times, frequently, we come across a key and no longer know what it is for. Our rules of conservation, of co-operation, of collaboration can so easily dissolve trust and security with the loss of keys. We are both collectively and independently dependent on keys. So too for the attainment of them. We get keys to lock something in, or to lock something out. And putting one’s address on the name tag of a key is hardly the way to ensure against future loss. We are conscious of where we keep our keys, most of the time. And sometimes, we give friends a spare key. But the keys to our bank accounts, or to our computers, or to our castles are kept private, secret, secured, we hope. The rule of three applies both to our artistic and practicable sensibilities: head, heart, and kept somewhere filed away for reference.

In that singular adverb, ‘somewhere’, lies the problem. The key to a life is somewhere. Thing is, should we die (when we die,) there is the need of another (preferably one’s trusted loved ones) to unlock one’s ordinarily private files in order to access the bank accounts, the computer files, the life insurance papers, the mortgage and tax papers, as well as the photos and letters of a lifetime. And the key to it all, in the necessity to disburse, or to preserve, or to discard, lies in the value given to everything in one’s will, or given by the subjective decisions of the one who retains the key. Undiscovered wills leave great confusion. Un-updated wills can leave a great sense of inequity. And too decisive wills (“I’ve left all my millions to Fluffy,”) can drive some to despair. Somewhere, somehow, sometime or another, we each must become responsible for knowing where we, or those we care for, keep our keys.

To get to the point. Unlocking one’s thoughts is seldom a direct process, especially if one is right brained, an abstract thinker, or of a metaphorical mind readily given to a predilection for the propensity to prevaricate. Words are not always clear-cut keys. Stop. No. Go. Shut up. Rather, like the very many brush strokes attending the making of a painting, words are as layered and as multifaceted as a moving stream that gurgles and burbles its way to the ocean. And somewhere in all of the tumble of activity and surge of energy that allows for the song to be created, the essay to be written, the bruited meaning(s) to become clear, are the key phrases that invigorate another’s understanding, that unlock the symbolism and the metaphor and the meaning. Or do we not get the drift? Do left-brained apprehenders prefer precise impeccability of phrasing?

We keep our keys close by. We find another’s keys and we hope to help the owner rediscover them. We decide to be more secure, more conscious, more responsible, more prescient, and, yes, even more-better with our lives. We look at others more closely. We look at our landscapes with yet more appreciation. And we look at ourselves with more circumspection, with yet greater metacognition, and with more clarity. Clarity. How very obscured all else can be when we no longer have the keys to our kingdom. Or is my meaning lost too? Look yet more closely at the picture provided to you, (above); like the overview of one’s life, the keys we might have lost are there. We need but see them.

Tuesday, May 5, 2020

Insidious Insights



The cages are of my own making. Is it not so for most of us? Except that, at this age and stage, I can walk quite easily through the first-floor bars, their being neither too tight for my older frame, nor yet all clad up so that only an open door might provide egress. It is now as though the ribs contain but light-filled spaces, allowing one freely to breathe. We each know such cages. And we each know the other cages too, the ones that we keep dark. We each can have these conscious curtailments that define our existence, mostly of our own making. We can draw our curtains. We can close our doors. We can lock away our treasures. And from our own windows we can survey that which is without, from within. But not all cages are of our own making; many get imposed on us by our acculturation, our circumstances, and by the power of others. How to stay clear?

Such has been the insidious effect of this 2020, with its social distancing, its laws and regulations forbidding this and that. We find ourselves in the cages of our dwellings; or in the confines of our automobiles; or visiting each other from a distance; like prisoners of our collective dilemma.   

As a friend writes, “[I’m] Going into my mind because going out of my mind is not an option.”*

Yes, the cages that define our comfortable rooms, that contain our hopes for the future, that outline the very superstructure supporting our individual existence, needs be thought about. Or else we shall but go our habitual way from room to room, or mayhap venture outside, yet stay leashed to the expectations, and the conditioning, and the perpetuation of unquestioned traditions imposed by our history. Since babies, have we not been stopped from unfettered freedom by the bars of our cribs; by the locked doors and cabinets of our childhood; by the fences of our yards; by the rules of the classroom; by the expectations on us of being a responsible adult? It all has been structured to keep one safe. The societal cages make of us a species apparently free to move around the globe, (particularly before the advent of Covid-19,) yet still, we were enabled to do so precisely because we were expected to follow conventional rules, regulations, and expectations; it made no matter how different the society was into which we were able so freely to move about. After all, barring places like North Korea, we did travel fairly easily. After all, except that one needed a visa, and a passport, and proof of financial wherewithal for the journey, one could just about go anywhere.

Given the new framing (as seen in the picture above,) that sense of freedom is what I got when actually walking through the walls of the superstructure of the building in situ. There was the delight of being entirely within my rights. There was no guard to harry me off the property. There was no time-constraint other than that which I chose. There was nothing other than the differentiation in the sizes of rooms that could curtail my process. Except that all the cages were on one level. And the stairway, although nailed down the first five steps to the landing, was entirely loose up to the second floor. To hazard going the next four, to the loose board at the top, merely to get a glimpse of the vaster expanse before me, was risky at best. But at the very least, provided I thought about where to place my balance, I was safe enough, temporarily. The superstructure was not yet ready to ascend to a second floor.

We progress through the Memes of evolution in simultaneous apprehensions of horizontal and vertical accretion. We comprehend but barely, at times, the significance of the cages into which we become conditioned. We at times do “go out of my mind.” And that fear of not being able to understand, to be conscious, to be alert, can indeed be scary. So, yes, it is best advised to keep ‘going into one’s mind,’ for in our better perception of ourselves, within our world, we shall indeed be broaching the universe of what it means to be free, to be compassionate, integrative, and healing.

(*By permission: Mike Jablonski) 

                            “Going into my mind because going out of my mind is not an option.