"If a man does not keep pace with his companions..."

"... perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away."

(Quoted from the works of Henry David Thoreau.)

I said at the beginning of this year after stumbling through sickness that I would not give in unless it were for serious sickness. This really explains why I began reading In Search of Lost Time at the beginning of the year; the length of time that I was sick and unable to think clearly I took to read that novel. I have a guilt complex about wasted time, even if it was physically impossible to make use of. Reading the work of a man who wrote regardless of sickness about the value of life and prevailing virtue seemed like a way to overcome this that was most apt. I am at a lull at this moment which can only be overcome by outright faith in myself and in the people around me. I have re-gathered momentum in the past and will not allow for the trivialities of life to break my stride. 

I have been walking in a direction that nobody pointed out for me, and the pages of books appeared before me like enticing leaves in late Autumn leading do dark and mysterious places, bereft of summer but encapsulating a new motion, a new way of life that is quiet and reflective. What are the seasons but nature's way of communicating the deep change and nature we are held within? We ought to be in dialogue with it, but we spectacularly fail in noticing the beautiful flux that is present in the year; another in the life of that vast infinite whole. How could a man not pause for an indefinite time, reeling at the lack of harmony present between himself and the whole? It is my passion to be within it even if it means to walk on paths that I have not been told of. If the pages of books bring back to my generation that insight gathered, those pockets of light and insight retained and passed on so generously, then I choose to gather them and marvel in them, and find a way of creating a tapestry of all of what I have gathered and unfolding it as soon as I feel it is complete.

Where I wander I do not feel lost, but always connected, never estranged. Because of what I see around me, the seeds that gracefully grow and the saplings and the brimming and effulgent spring-time, charged with new life, I find that the words that we use, the language that we speak has not the wider reach or the understanding of the limitless horizon. Our language is a beggar's grief; the not-knowing how things will last without having another thing in our lives, another song or another play. There is grief for the man who cannot follow his own path and follow his own song.

What is life but a drawn out moment we have been offered to make our own lasting and meaningful contribution? A moment brimming with potential, and do we hazard to refuse the accepted language? To we protest when life is never explained to us as a miracle? I have met people in my life I could barely comprehend, for they were not struck by the resplendence of a moment. I hear people say that love is blind, but love is and always has been clarity and an ability to see past the true limitations of what man can understand and see. Love is the cornerstone of understanding and I have sometimes found it lacking in people. I started with pure love, and I am here in this moment admitting that for that purpose I seek out a better comprehension of the life that I exist within.

I have recently acknowledged the difference between two words: purpose and reason. Purpose tends towards understanding, whereas reason seeks out knowledge and explanation. There is a sublime difference, because the latter can be found without much intimate human dialogue. I've been reading a work called "Enlightenment Contested" by Jonathan Israel and this recognition really crystallizes therein: when our descendants were looking for ways to explain and rationalize our philosophies and beliefs, we created a new world to live within. Most of our western leaders up to the American transcendental movement were absorbed in it, and it was functional. But what did we serve to lose by it? The actual nature of human thought and understanding was cast aside in favor of convention and only now do the creases and wear in the fabric begin to present themselves. Only now does the pattern lose its appeal as we grow further from our true nature, and only if we seek to understand it by the same means we chose to exploit it can we really get anywhere at all.