duration & disorder 

The other day, it was overcast and I could not see my shadow as I ran. I had not been able to see my shadow in life much in the past days either, I thought. I am my feelings, I am my thoughts, when I am in that way. I trip all over myself without the distance from my thoughts and feelings then. They inhabit me without mercy, without order, like a haunting.   

I though then, I am not the thoughts, I am not the feelings that flow through me. They flow through me and I know I am not them because of their duration and disorder.  

The watcher knows this. The watcher is alive but silent and immobile like an old enormous tree or mountain. The longer the watcher watches ebbs and flows, the pulsing life inside me,  the less convinced I am with the mirage that is ephemeralism (mother of fear). The watcher grows bigger and stronger. A sense of permanence takes root somewhere. In permanence there is primarily order.  

The ebb and flow are necessary. They are life. They are telling. The same things keep getting dragged to shore and I learn that love and discipline are the parents of joy and freedom. 

The price we pay, we gladly will, for life to explode out into time, along its serpentining thread where only a moment can happen in a moment instead of all at once. That is all it is, the experiment of impermanence: life unrolling along a track in mystery going interminably fast or interminably slow. You choose.  

The photograph of the flowers in a vase was taken by me and edited with Instagram filters. The subsequent double and triple images were done using Layout (which allows you to do mirror images and has no seams) and the last image using PicStitch (I could not find another collage app with 12 frames).