Flight (words)

Have you ever noticed that there is a point right before a bird takes off in flight where they pause, glancing upward, then bend and push off on their pointy bird-feet to get the leverage to fly? Watching that quiet moment outside my window gave me the kind of deep recognition you only get from seeing someone do something you've actually done before.

We all try to gauge how well something will go before we jump into it for the first time, but flight seems so intrinsic to being a bird, I assumed they could do it with their eyes closed.

Now that I have the time to think and notice these kinds of things I've been amazed by the sheer effort it takes to accomplish most of the tasks we take for granted — mental and physical. That is, until we can no longer do them easily. I've been resolving to take with me into my everyday life the kind of mindful-appreciation it takes to wonder at the magnitude of each moment without dwelling so that I can actually live in the moment. Just as difficult to do as it was to say.

Do I wish I had a picture of the bird crouched just before take-off? Perhaps. Do I wish I had photographs to stand as place markers for the millions of poetic moments my prose-speaking-mind fails to capture metrically? Sure.

But all of these moments live somewhere in my mind waiting to be recalled and used as fodder for a future creative endeavor. And sometimes it's nice to write without pictures in order to remind you all where I started. Sometimes its nice to diversify my creative energy even if just for a moment before I plunge back into the world of shutter speed and light.

Ludovician Bait

We spend our lives trying to make sense of an infiltration of information. From birth, we're assaulted with sounds, sights, smells, tastes and emotions. Then later, thoughts, theories, stories and complex explanations. A big chunk of what makes us who we are is how we put together these pieces, creating our outlook of the world and the way in which we reverberate back what we see.

This reverberation is an artist's work. Some concepts can be manifested simply — love, laughter, friendship, marriage, joy, the kinds of ideas that bind us together on a basic emotional level — through symbolic images or even simple phrases. We can do this with everyday language both verbal and non-verbal. Doing so allows us to create order among the chaos of bombardment.

But there are tons of ideas that bombard us that can't be ordered using conventional methods. It's these ideas — and a longing inside myself to find a way to order them — that drive me to create. And I think that is why art exists — to create an order to the pieces of our lives that seem impossible to order using conventional methods.

Both Joe and I are heavily engrossed in The Raw Shark Texts , which fits right between magical realism and science fiction along a book shelf organized by genre. It's a sort of text-obsessed psychological thriller that evolves by unraveling the mystery of the main character's identity, which was lost along with his memories and personal contacts before the book begins.

The book seems heavily engrossed in trying to create order from the fragments of reality that exist outside of order. It spurred these thoughts in me and is inspiring me to write more.