THINQon : On Tides

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Morgan Milford, young

On Tides

Latest Post: April 21, 2010 at 2:05 AM

22 followers

Do you think Poseidon knew just what he had? What does it mean to control the tides, to control an ebbing, to control both the coming and the going? It even proved too powerful for him, because where is he now? At some point he was delivered out to sea with the rest of his brethren and their morning hasn't (re)dawned.

How does that poem go?

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed

I'm afraid there is a breaking and its inevitable. We are born and we grow courageously towards our end. And from every perspective that end looks like a blackabysmaldestructionoftheuniverse. And we ebb further and further from the shore and pray that the moon will carry us back just for one more daybreak tide before our journey out to sea.

I was carried out by a rip tide once. From the beach the water was streaked so it looked like there were thick and fat fingers of brown and rippling water. And I was in the palm of it all and I was being dragged out and sometimes under and I thought I was done and at what point had everyone but me disappeared from the water? I screamed to the shore and there were frantic motions and from salt-filled eyes I thought I saw people gesturing to the left and I wasn't sure what was over there and I wasn't sure if I wanted to figure out but I swam and I'm not sure if the salt on my face was from my tears or the ocean but all that didn't matter when I collapsed onto the sand, lungs louder than the waves.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming!

And what begins must end but also what ends must begin a new because The First Law of Thermodynamics says energy can not be created or destroyed, only passed along and turned into something new. It's a never-ending oscillation, we change and we remain and there is always a Second Coming and it's never exactly the same coming as what came before because the shoreline has moved just a quarter of an inch downcoast and that changes everything except familiarity.

I sense the waning of life and it feels like a singer who knows he has to finish a song but doesn't want to, so he plays it out until even we forget that when we began this song we also signed up for its finish. And it's all just a ride and a cliche about a rollercoaster and bullets that go up always come down and hit someone on the head, even if only in a cartoon.

And our tides have already been set and it's only on us to decide how we'll ride them and how we'll prepare for that final dredging. But for now I like the crashing waves and tomorrow I'll enjoy the calm stillness and what meteorologist can predict the day following that?

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

It's nothing new. Only time and its continuing.

Bobby Hiii tagged this post as Very enjoyable.

Tom Jerome sent kudos.

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Hanna Clapson, I am an English major. I write and think. I...

April 20, 2010 at 11:57 PM

22 followers

From Ecclesiastes:

To everything there is a season,
A time to give birth and a time to die; A time to plant and a time to uproot what is planted.
A time to kill and a time to heal; A time to tear down and a time to build up.
A time to weep and a time to laugh; A time to mourn and a time to dance.
A time to throw stones and a time to gather stones; A time to embrace and a time to shun embracing.
A time to search and a time to give up as lost; A time to keep and a time to throw away.
A time to tear apart and a time to sew together; A time to be silent and a time to speak.
A time to love and a time to hate; A time for war and a time for peace.

But I wonder. Maybe it is so that all those polar times exist at once. When we pretend we're young again on the seesaw (and maybe really become so) he on the bottom does not cease being he, rather he is only waiting for his guaranteed return. Which is to say that while the sun is shining, somewhere it is not; and because we in the daylight know this is so, we simultaneously exist in our guaranteed darkness.

It seems that to live means to live in this teetering. Everywhere I look there is a partiality and a splitting and from that splitting a further splitting and so on and so on all the way to the physicists at CERN breaking apart the smallest pieces of the universe and only ever finding other universes.

Some days I'm blissfully happy and on others the water is cold and dark but it's really the range between the two that characterizes my breadth and my essence and without every degree on the spectrum would I really be me?

Can Newton's Third Law be applied to man? Am I both my actions and my equal and opposite reactions?

Everywhere I look I see sine waves. I see comings and goings. I'm either coming or going. Is it even worth it to maximize the ride up? It only means the fall is all the greater. But who wants to live on a solid line? Sometimes the fall is the fun despite the scary.

But doesn't it hurt knowing what we build will inevitably be destroyed? Is that man's path? To come to grips with his losing hand?

There's no cheating entropy.

Bobby Hiii tagged this post as Brilliant.

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Tom Jerome, Raised in the NYC metro area (NJ) I have lived...

April 21, 2010 at 2:05 AM

13 followers

Lao-tzu said:

There is something, an undifferentiated whole, that was born before heaven and earth, It has only abstract images, no concrete form. It is deep, dark, silent, undefined, we do not hear its voice. Assigning a name to it, I call it the Way.

But, Lao-tzu also said: The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao.

In Chinese philosophy:
There is the Void (unknowable).
From the Void comes the One. We know the One exists, but can not speak of it as we reside within Its totality. Could we call this One - God?
From the One comes the Two. This is the world of duality in which we exist. Existance - Non-existance. Light - Dark. Cold - Hot. Beautiful - Ugly, Yin and Yang.
From the Two comes the Three which is the synthesis, this is the world of relationship.
From the Three come the 10,000 things. We move beyond the idea of cause and effect and express the world as a series of relationships. It is neither black nor white but an infinate gradation of shades of gray.

I know not where I come from, nor where I go. I live in a world that appears as cylical; and as each day seems to have a beginning and and end, I experience it as such. But just as the River in never the same river I am never the same me nor is the world.

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