It would surprise most people little that there exist opportunities in the land of opportunity. Perhaps it would surprise a person born in the US that under different circumstances they would regard being in the US and living the life of a struggling normal US citizen as a benefit worthy of some effort. Until I lived in a town bisected by the Rio Grande, I had a habit of saying, "I know which side of the river I am on." I turns out that my habit made some sense philosophically, but geographically was ignorant.
This, it turns out, is a useful door, as narratives go, to the purpose of my typing today. Number one, happily, opportunities exist. Number two, not so happily, ignorance of universal rights and spiritual grace can pollute and degrade even the most earnest individuals spirit... rendering, someone gesturing at beautiful light falling on all of us, into a canny survivalist with dreams barely discernable from a grindstone.
Cute discussions of people in the US often treat numbers and physical descriptions of people like they are Stanley tools: practical and symbolic devices which will get a job done. It seems a barely noticable side step from grand concepts like "majority rule" to step into a flatland of spreadsheets showing who is being ruled and to what extent they will rule.... live... establish the morays of culture delightful and humanely unpredictable. Running the numbers, unlike running the bulls, is no paradigm of unruly ecstasy. Running the numbers is more like running blood, running sweat and tears running down faces of beings who share what I have always been allowed to enjoy... but, have been nearly broken due to an awareness of a range of mountains soaring proudly between the travels of people in their valley and the sun. Shadowed by an otherwise beautiful display, the conventional world rockin in the USA, you know the profane and sacred fact of our Western emergence: random actors, groups of unusual dissent, churches of conventional and conservative souls with an open door to the most foolishly living people passing through. The range of mountains between the sun and shadowed valley, cast their shadow due to a subtle lack of reason. The sun is ius naturale; natural light. The sun belongs to the whole of terra firmas activities which depend on any phenomena that occur above absolute zero. For the happy alternate universe where everything is at absolute zero... ius naturale can be treated as over exposure indeed. However, our hands probe in the entrails of the principles of natural light. Holding a fading Geranium blossom we inhale the musk of the leaves pressing one between two fingers and bewildered simultaneously by the cardinal optics and the airborne hydrocarbons. For what purpose this? One flower can do that. Men do not bear flowers. Men do not open the genetic machinery and truly reach the foreman level of engineer with the simplest of plants machinery. Men depend as desperately upon the tissue of a cell wall as the rubiks cube of a cells genes. Every part of every plant and animal is held in the gentle hands of some creator. Call the creator whomever you wish. She/He/It--- Our Father, tangle with the simplest of creation. Tumbling from the phenomenology of the spinning planets and patient urgency of the Sun's Hydrogen is a wreath running through everything, everyone and all. Through the sink to clean your dishes, just as through the glass that holds your mold brewed beer, just as through the pipes that are there by necessity, just as in the Pond where you only cast for orange gold. The scales and quick anxiety of the fish hold natural light... your hands move with no more thought than the blood in your aorta. It has simply been the practice of man to amble toward a target of natural life and register surprise with the aid of a ruler. What is nice to tell your friends, need not be thoughtful to the wreathe of our temperate networked realm. The circles come off our fishermans cast lure, in the plane of the ponds surface a nod to the fishermans unerring tendency to avoid depressing shadowed valleys. Circles like the Earth describes, but with an odd way of every part of the circles being related to every other part of the circle, even as the parts travel and broaden the circle--- hewing to a fixed speed, distance and shape. Just a cast of the lure, might say the fisherman, "what's the point... they ain't biting today."
Opportunity. Some say it knocks. Any scene can be seen by a vast diversity of perspectives. Take your face. Maybe you have never much enjoyed a mirror. Maybe you enjoy mirrors too much. Perhaps you think you are old... odd.... ugly.... or you have lost a morphological equity that when you hadn't lost it you appreciated hardly at all. Then again, maybe you just think you are God's gift to the human race... and kittens and puppies too. Good for you.
Next time you stand in font of your bathroom mirror. Whatever you think of the mortal you see on that flat apparatus, do me a favor. Take your index finger and hold it up to the stranger that is the part of you you never chose. Sign, not the bird, but the wait a minute index finger universal gesture. And, whether the mirror is conveinently fogged, or crystal clear, touch your reflection lightly. Once, then again. First you held your finger up to get the attention of this chariot for your soul. So much on our mind! This is no joke. First ask for some permission. Then, touch that bodily reservoir of natural lights phenomenons. Phenomenology. Lovely word. In short, in a word "phenomenal." Why say I this? Because there is so very much you do not need to take trouble learning about that reflection. True, it, the reflection is pretty close to a description of the tempting neighborhood in a good school district called [your name] Heights. And true, you know a lot about that saint/ sinner, scoundrel, ect. That being who deserves privacy as much as anyone. Either a locked door and some private concerns or the Saint/Sinner might simply jump off a cliff. It is nothing to be embarrassed about. We need a little distance from the prying eyes and hand cupped ears of the (why call it this?) nosy. Eyes ears and noses! Well, in that mirror are yours. But, really, who cares what you got there. What is there is describable, sure, to some extent by science... and to a broader, intrusive and frequently pathology generating extent, is described by the Stanley tools I mentioned at the beginning of this torture session. You know, societies aesthetics and the zeitgeist of valuation, independent of humble logic. "She's Hot" is a statement meant for accord. An instrument for power and spell casting. Rarely is the statement "I'm Hot" made in the bathroom where you stand there with your index finger against the strange newtonian physics of your avatar. "I'm hot" generates no accord, except in instances where the dynamics are being monitored by social rules coloring straight through the lines which are usually a common boundary between people and the rutting animal. In a sense, of course, in America and in the heart and mind of a practical citizen, its nice to know you are hot. Most folks could never know or bother with such a thing. It none the less happens in the narratives which we keep our Stanley tools within and ready. As pathologies go in the grip of man, it is deserving of some attention, sure, but as the normal people of the world say, "big deal."
With your finger against that mirror, you are not going to actually experience as alluring an experience and useful a lesson as we always wish for when we imagine a reflection. The believing of seeing is just that. The content of such an encounter as the inspection of your reflection, is surely as close to an exciting zero as possible, to the curious mind. Provided you were to set aside the sad facts of what we generally make of ourselves, you might play a little game with that image in the mirror and brook some inquiry into what the image, after all, is an image of. You might learn that the chariot of the soul, which while hardly being the whole description of the body of one's self, is a hell of a canvas. Oddly enough, even the leaders of agreed upon knowledge... Scientists, forget interesting details when they scale their investigations of the orgin of the reflection you have just removed your finger from. You only need touch it twice or so. And, I don't mean the orgins, as in Creation. I just mean what the body is. Who the body is. Just as surely as a pizza could never come to your door if all you told the employee at the pizza joint was your preference for pepporoni and extra cheese, then hung up to wait while rolling your eyes that things could ever take so long for a damn peporonni pizza... the pizzeria needs to know something about you. True, when your stomach rumbles and your mouth waters, and a wad of cash has miraculously avoided the reality TV of the terrible economy, it really isn't the greatest time of week, day or circumstance to get real real talky and figure stuff out... but, none the less, one of the strange facts of life that has nothing so much to do with the birds and bees, is the fact that in the modern world you got longitude and latitude and you got you. You always gotta tell someone where you at. You can't check the movie listings, swipe a credit card, call your Mother on Mother's Day or savor what could coincidentally being considered pretty savory without saying somehow, to some thing or some one, "right here. Not there." Your adress. A specific thing. If you get a number wrong, that is going to destroy the whole shebang. So we become accustomed to simply providing our address with every phone call, donut purchase, and job application. Sometimes autonomically, sometimes with the tongue. But all the time. It is a fact of life.
For probably strange leftover sacred concepts of our physical selves, we are less comfortable looking at our avatar in the bathroom mirror and coming to any kind of "natural" conclusion with any sort of honest inquiry. One of the first frustrations attending our reflection, is the seeming fact that one's reflection is of one's self. There, in the mirror, in my case is one man. A somewhat skeletal, bald very slightly pot bellied once upon a time blond, but now red bearded middle aged individual. Props go to modern genetics since looking in the mirror I know I can be called a homo sapien, or have a sample of my blood sent to a lab to determine what I am. One name, human is shorter than homo-sapien, which is far shorter than the labs very very long genetic reading of my blood. However, there is a problem when we look at that individual and call him a species. For there are in the genes something you never guess in the single man standing in the mirrors frame. Ancient lifeforms have their genes in all human genetics. Some of the lifeforms were illnesses. Some of them lived in human cells as collaborative lifeforms who's habitat was a human body cell. Eventually, the single celled creatures, with their own DNA became part of the whole shebang. So mitocondria, with their own DNA, to this day are simply composed through the bodily lumberyard of human history and where mitocondria once had their choice of creatures to reside within, for humans, a fraction of that ancient organism where once it lived in independence, today it's a huge part of our power over the realm. Respiration would be impossible without creatures created seperate from human kind. What we were when we combined with mitochondria is an extremely interesting question to think about.... but the list is long. And we have this mirror to consider... right?
So, amongst the easy mistakes to make is to consider the single, white, bald, bearded skin and bone male an individual of singular qualities, independent from the taxidermist prey. The avatar of the reflection does not so easily tell the fuller story. The subject is a bit of a long winded tale. Eventually a realization occurs where you feel you are questioning harmless assumptions and rewriting some hard won truths. It's true you tell your friend over coffee, "I was never good in school. I could care less who I am. I just wanna have some fun." Completely fair. I think you are unlikely to have read this far should that be the breadthe of your curiosity.
Outside of your cells, but inside the frame of the mirror our so called individual has an identity that also includes a few other species. Sometimes the viruses hidded in our DNA and old single celled creatures comprise a physical fact of our physical cells... literally WHAT we are. Other times creatures simply enjoy the giant canvass... for the least artistic reasons imaginable. Your face, every face, enjoys between six and ten small animals that live in your eyebrows, ears, nostils, hairline and in your mouth. Some of these animals could never be seen by the human eye. Others are simply small enough to defy simple measures of identification. The armpits, groin, areas of privation and excretion and the feet have dozens of lifeforms which feed off the shedding and exothermic heat of the human organism. The fungus on the feet, and bacteria in the pits and cracks and crevices provide a competitive environment which is not friendly to more malicious micro organisms. Changes in PH and aromatic compounds inside and on the surface of an adult human are part of the elaborate mechanism to evolution over the millions of years humans have grown in complexity. In truth, as you might have garnered already, we cannot be described with much accuracy, and to an intelligent observers taste by the contents of our DNA. While DNA is a fabulous phenomenon that, as a binary language carries certain binary facts through our past and into our descendents and future in a manner suprising to find in the flesh of lifeforms--- the asset of our DNA in some ways is more a tillable realm in the cells of we species, where, like the difference between a few yards of soil into which the roots of corn grows and the kernals displayed in the produce department... a lifeform or two or three must intersect with the groceries eventuality and the soils harbor of entropies sirens. So much to do. In the same sense, where DNA has been given the heraldry by the default devisors of the natural history of human beings, it is a stunning portion of our bodies.. as beautiful and elegantly vulnerable a part of us as we got------ but, we are protected by and attended to in the company of and owe great respect for the things that crawl on us but are hardly noticed within, or without. I probably, as a six foot slender man have seven to nine pounds of micro organisms in my gastro intestinal tract. While it is true that I had to pick those "bugs" up after my mom delivered me, it is without doubt that I would neither be a man with my name nor survive for any length of time here... on Earth, without the three quarter trillion within me and the one quarter trillion upon me. Andy Coffey, as his reflection might not always reveal is a miraculous collection of sometimes more cells with no human DNA, than the cells with human DNA. Most of the time the community of me, might not rule with executive skills granted to the majority. Though it would be hard to determine the extent to which sensorily affective substances and health rewarding processes are provided and driven and rewarded to me or destroyed due to my ignorance... ect. There are well known rules that suggest our diets should be as we have for so so long known not the conventional American one. When you consider that our food is processed partially by billions of organisms... transforming what we eat into something as seperate from our food sources as imaginable. The realm of true phenomenon in the colony and community of a man or womans self hood is a far cry from tired traditional views driven by fear and those Stanley tools I mentioned at the begining.
So, that's a good start. I was intending to discuss more on the subject of natural light and law. Those subjects are what caused me to begin. However, the person in my mirror is ultimately who people mean when they say my name. Entralled by the phenomenon of self hood, I forget continuously my miraculous community. Saying things like, "I enjoy being alone!" it is easy for me to forget how hard it really is to ever be alone. My reflection might reveal a middle aged bald guy, but my body is a miraculous wonderland none the less. I'll be tapping the mirror twice when I can manage to forget the tools of power and remember instead the gifts curiosity can square with my shame.
