Free Write from April 25, 2010 - Lindley Karstens
Like coffee grinds in the bottom of the mug, my brain is full of unfinished debris; outstanding research, stories that need endings or beginnings, pages and pages of verbal diarrhea requiring ruthless editing into some semblance of coherency, paintings in various stages of completion. Nothing finished. Nothing to give me that satisfied glow, that “aha!” moment when it’s all tidy and printed and done.
Done. That’s one of those concepts that compulsive souls like my own cling to in desperate hope that whatever it is that I’m getting up to do in the morning will come to have more meaning than the production of numbers in a bank account that permit me to continue to drag my bag of goodies through life without having to give anything back.
Perhaps it would be a positive experience, this “giving it back”. What do I need all the stuff for anyhow? I have no idea but I'm convinced I need all kinds of things to organize more things. Even with my Kindle I obsess about the need for a larger archive. It holds a thousand books. Is that all? But in the wonderful world of floating electrons, magnetic charges, ones, zeros, on, off, I can possess all kinds of things and no trees have to die.
Is that really true? I guess not. It takes energy to power servers, and fuel to keep mines going to produce the metal ores and minerals necessary to create skinny hard drives and raging chips. Though I suppose I could make myself feel better by comparing the volume of resources consumed to produce a physical book versus an electronic book. But in truth it’s all just stuff. Maybe I should be practicing non-attachment, playing the toad in the middle of the room working out the perfect questions so I can get my damned cookie and go home having accomplished something. Right? Right. Sure.
With gratitude to Sukha Gee for her fabulous Zen fairy tales and the toad that wasn't.
No comments:
Post a Comment