Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Beginnings

Beginnings are strange. They can be wonderful and terrifying. Nothing new comes of itself. There has always been something previous to birth it, and that in turn has been birthed. Human experience is entirely contained in this cycle. Though we like to think of beginnings and origins, there are truly no such things in our actual experience. The oak that grows from the acorn fell from an oak, which grew from an acorn, ad infinitum. We logically must conclude that there was a first oak or first acorn somewhere, but the point is that we have not ever experienced that. Nor has any human in memory.

So, in this vein I open this blog. It is a beginning, but on the heals of something else. I was a part of a once thriving message board which existed from the early days of the web...even before the term, "blog" existed. In fact that board still exists, but as a ruin of itself...a dusty hall preserved in seldom-travelled electronic corridors where dust and unknown creatures gather. Like the Fellowship entering Moria and finding it long silent, I am disheartened, not by the lack of traffic on the board, but by the memory of lively, sometimes angry, sometimes silly conversations that are no more. While a few still lurk those dark halls, most hae moved on to other fresher lands of social networks.

Eventually I followed after being told repeatedly to, "get with it." But find those truncated lightning fast, near instant random thoughts worse mental clutter than the constant stream of babble in my own mind which countless sages, and my own mentors have taught should be quieted in favor of deeper stiller waters. Even if I tried to keep my own thoughts and subsequent conversations coherant in that context, the constant barrage of "I like pepperoni" and "I really have to pee." comments would drown it out. So I turn to blogging. At least here my thoughts can process more fluidly without the clucking of so many microwave hens all popping off instantly useless cawcaws.

Why not keep it on paper, or in letters then? Well that has occured to me, but I don't do this to hear my own thoughts as much as to share them and receive feedback on them. So here we go. A once thriving space of ideas has waned and given birth to a new thing, unmomentous as it is.

We'll see how it goes...