If you are remotely familiar with this record, you know that I hold in my archives thousands upon thousands of pictures of clouds. Many of them are useless, blurry and incoherent, taken while shaking. Some of them, however, are quite useful. They tell a story, a story about stories.
Most of the time, seeing things differently involves simply seeing a thing for what it is and sometimes absurd beauty is all there is.
Other times, it is harder to see beautiful, though you know it is always there.
The challenge of having a neurological framework that is prone to distortion and dysfunction is that the world becomes, at times, a very different place. Actually, I have recognized that the world stays the same, but that my view shifts. The same store on the corner is a gem or a tragedy on any given day. The store hasn’t changed. It stays the same. The way I see it changes and thus the store becomes something other than what it is.
I haven’t gotten to email myself as much I’d like lately. Though I have been emailing many others. I forget sometimes that this presentation offers a somewhat limited view of what my life entails. Click Mosaic.
This could seem to focus on the floor and on the dark corners. The parts of the room that nobody notices. It seems to me that the floor and the corners are fairly important elements in any space.
Corners hold walls; Floors hold us. Between them is everything that makes a room.
I once said: “My heart is a warehouse.”
Other people have probably said the same thing. Having a warehouse heart is not an uncommon condition.
Keeping track of a concrete physical world is a good thing for me to do. It reminds me where I’m at. Then again, and this is the double-edge of mindfulness, being aware of the world around you can be fairly distressing.
There are sirens over on Biltmore. Somewhere, somebody is panicking. It is still light in San Francisco. People are just getting home from work. Infinite stories are unfolding.
That is beautiful.
The times I have been on antipsychotic medication (atypicals olanzapine, risperidone,and ziprasidone) I did not think about stories. The world stopped short about 3 inches from my face. Profoundly disconnected to everything but my medicated and sluggish brain, I watched it all go by with little more than detached interest. Trying to get through the day was a series of chores, doing things I cared nothing about. I didn’t believe in anything. Everything was numb. My head was filled with foam. I only wanted to sleep, I tried hard not to look at the sky, because I knew I would feel nothing.
Dopamine is linked to our ability to believe in things?)