Pass the potato salad at the Picnic of Chaos

It is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis.

Henry Miller in Of Art and the Future

Once again, Brain Pickings and Literary Jukebox boil it down to the bones.  Flux, we keep meeting like this.

My dreaming last night/this morning was of an estate on a river.  At first the river seemed slow and narrow but I walked with dream companions to other points where it was waterfalls, deep still pools and wide expanses with swift currents.  I thought about rivers when I woke up.  Water - flowing, changing, moving - and the closest I can come to a connection is that the river equals all of this, life as we live it out here in the world and inside, the universe(s) we contain and constant, continual metamorphosis.

I think at least some of our peace comes from letting go of the oars or tiller, acknowledging that we are of and with the flow of things much more vast than we.  In looking over our shoulders to be certain that whatever we just left is still there, fixed and unchanging, we find instead that the water is too fast, the point is much too far behind us and even if we could see it, it would be different than we expect.

This is not information I grew up knowing or even imagining.  Yet what I suspect is on a level of deeper awareness, this is not really news.  I have tried for much of my life to nail everything down, each corner, all the sides.  I've held the image of the picnic tablecloth spread on the ground, pegged down every two inches to keep any corner from lifting or the whole thing from taking flight.  The combination of denial and wishful thinking that I constructed has been evaporating until now only the memory of it remains, along with the reasonably enjoyable Picnic of Chaos, not really all that bad once you admit it is what we have, it is all we have.

No action required at this time

In a tribute to Human Powers of Observation, I noticed that my life had lost its shape or had taken on a new, unfamiliar one.  There is too much drift, too much that feels as though I've become unmoored from what seemed steady and almost virtuous. These are not items large enough to be seen from space, they can barely be identified when in the same room, but they were my almost-constants, like drawing, color pencil work, staying in touch (other than Facebook, without which I would be substantially incommunicado), making stuff, staying awake more, not wandering through my days like a person wearing oven mitts who is trying to replace the screw in a pair of reading glasses.

Having now spent nearly a week with this awareness, I come, once again, to the crossroads of duality.  Perhaps an amorphous state does not signal failure to measure up but instead merely indicates what is.   And how is one to know?  As the day begins here with a burned-out light bulb in an inconvenient place, a shrinking amount of good drinking water and probably two or three other pesky matters, my strongest guidance tells me to let it go, for now.  Keep it simple.  All will be resolved, or not, and that, too, is a resolution.

I am coming around to the belief - too bad there's not enough material here for a manifesto or to gain tax-exempt status - that all is in flux and may always have been in flux, flux is not to be feared or avoided, flux and chaos are second, possibly first, cousins and every thing that is is a process.  An evolutionary process.

Shining brightest in the midst of what for the moment I will call knowing is that immediate action is not indicated.  Rather than action of any sort, a passive yet grace-filled state of allowing has been asked for. At last, an assignment to which I may be equal.