Willow Boast "....I have never encountered enthusiasm, but rather free, unprejudice reasoning and judgement in religious matters."

Familiar words, they run across my eyes and resonate deep within my head with an unimpressive familiarity. As the last words of our reading which summed up to over 500 pages, I put down the works of Immanuel Kant presumably until another chapter of my life brings me to another chapter of his. Just as soon as I am beginning to feel I have gained some glorious insight into the universal meanings behind religion and our rational capacity, the professor jolts my success train mid-track and brings back that cloud of grey smog that fills every beautiful day with a touch of demise. He writes in big scribbled letters on the board and without once changing his expression through his large, studious spectacles, looks me straight in the eye and says "but he is weak like all of us"

What could possibly be weak about a man who spent the majority of his life devoted to the improvement of ideas and search for truth? Is that not one of the most ultimate goal that we all hold somewhere in our subconscious, and ridiculously, devoutly write hundreds of thousands of pages of Internet text on throughout our lives? Yet next to my physical mind, neighboring my training soul, I understood the weakness that had crept in and the delusion that had been painted as truth within the text. Kant had fallen in love with his ideas and by the end of his creation, he was no longer writing for truth or in search of truth...he was writing a self-enthused love letter that stroked his own intellect until it was raw and open, exposing it's own loathing and folly.

This is how I become; this is the truth of all free writers who philosophize and ponder and look within to write without. As one writes, we fall in love with the idea we write because it is a product of our own mind. Like a child from our own womb, we loose objectivity and see it as a creation, beautiful because it holds a part of our most inquisitive selves. Inside every word there is a cavern where we store our ego and our hopes of what the words will say to another or even to ourselves in a time far removed. Once our thoughts have been concocted, divided, organized, deciphered, and given language, we expose the product and judge the result. But the judgement has lost all touch with reality because the idea itself is a part of us. Just as one can not look in the mirror and see with the very eyes that glance upon the glass a strangers face, the writer cannot trace his own words and see beyond the glamour of their creation.

Granted, sometimes we write very shitty things. Works are spewed forth and later, I wish to take a large canister of bleach to them all like bad vomit stains on perfectly white carpet. Yet even these works escape real, true, criticism. I am the dancer who wants to perfect technique and the art thereof yet I am blind to the causes of my blunders. And it is this very mystery of creation, the twisty tie that keeps the loaf of truth forever enclosed, that will separate thinking man from untouched reality forever. Are we destined to live in our little circles of self-hatred to obsession? I sure hope not because after this post, I am feeling pretty confident that I am on a breakthrough to something....ha


In other worlds......Somehow life has tricked me into living some sped up reality and I am now approaching my last semester of college. Today I filled out my official application for a degree (which costs money:bogus!) and in four months from now I will leave the classroom to never return....ok maybe not for at least a few years. I look forward to home, to the trees and their beautiful shades of yellow and orange, to the cold waves, the warm hands, and fireplaces that wait for me. This holiday season I pledge to give thanks through my actions for everything around me so that no love ever goes unnoticed. Enjoy this poem I found (it reminds me of the pine tree I had in my front yard that I used to hide in)


I wanted to be a Willow Tree

Tangled in the loving slender arms
I would knot the ends
To make a swing
Under my willow tree
It sat next to an old farmhouse
Deserted since the depression
Along the banks of
The Wapsipinicon
Untamed grandeur
During a storm
I climbed into her knotty divide
The tree held me
Like a mother cuddling me to her breast
I wanted to be that willow tree
Its soulful sway
The ability to stand firm
Throughout the worst
Give comfort to anyone seeking it
Someone took an ax
To my willow tree
As if a nuisance
Without regard
For all it endured
Barrenness now resides
Where life once lived
My beautiful tree
I weep for it
Because it wept for me
~Wanda Swim Strunk  ¶ 8:31 PM