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.