It’s funny, you know. I can remember being a child of five and comparing an artist's rendering of the solar system with that of an atom. Of course, my mind was free and uncluttered by preconception. I just looked at the two images and couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out what was so fundamentally different between the two. What, orders of magnitude? So the Earth is a gravitically bound mega-electron, whirling around its nucleus/sun. Magnitude. I think that more than anything, our egos alone prevent us from bellying up to the fact that we’re nothing more than infinitesimal specks clinging unnoticed to a sub-atomic particle in a madly whirling dust storm on a far grander plane of scale than we can perceive or even understand.

So, I ask you this: How do you define physical boundary? I mean, here we are, all towering monuments of complexity built up from organs made of tissues made of cells made of organelles made of molecules made of atoms, on and on ad infinitum. All the while, energy is spilling off of us on crosscurrents like vast oceans of wind flowing through hollow nothing. Energy. We consume it, trade in it, refine and redirect it. Measured in any manner that you choose, energy is necessary to the condition of life. It is carried, processed, and conveyed through avenues as intangible as thought, emotion, or even the weight of a casual glance. How can one establish boundary or individuality in a condition as malleable and indefinable as that? In my own opinion, arguments toward establishing boundary based solely upon measures of organization fall inadequately short of the mark.

In the details, all things are constantly flowing into one another. If you think about it, we’re all in a perpetual state of physical contact with each other. We are that which surrounds us. It seems to me that any argument to the contrary would hold as much water as, say…the cells of your liver trying to argue that they aren’t actually a part of your body, but instead individual organisms unto themselves. The interconnectedness doesn’t simply peter out at the epidermis. It continues on with all things around it. We live, I think, in a condition very similar to the cells within our bodies. I think it should behoove us to avoid metastasizing and consuming the rest of the organism, even if we’ve failed thusfar to recognize its existence.

Energy is constantly winding down. All things grow slower, colder. Somewhere between the birthing and cessation come the processes of filtration (for lack of a better phrase). Filtering energy, that’s what we do. It’s no different than any other living thing on any scale. As conscious entities, however, we have the ability to focus and direct that energy in ways that operate outside of instinct or programming. By God, that’s a profound gift. It’s a shame that we cannot seem to bring ourselves to use it nobly.

Angels. I have held them in my very arms and wept outright with the joy of simply knowing. I am a part of you. You cannot change that. Circles within circles within circles, still.

Again, goodnight.

redguard@blackvault.com