I've been amazed with the intense ups and downs of emotion that I've been experiencing the last several months. At the highest of high moments, I feel as though the world had become suddenly transparent, all complications melt away, barriers to change crumble as I can effortlessly jump up to a new plane of existence. At the low moments, the bad old things not only re-emerge but do so with a haunting vigorous condemnation; I then feel all-too-limited and frail. This morning, I'm learning to move ahead with a quieter contentment that is sober and resolute.

In the past, I have found writing very early in the morning to be a very productive and rewarding discipline. I've been spending time far away from such a habit but decided last night to attempt a return this morning. So here I am, trying to write. Surprising revelation: nothing comes immediately!

As we were flying in last night from Boston at about 8:15pm, the sunlight was still illuminating the hills, valleys, and waterways of the Bay. Light and shadow that late in the day! I was really happy to come back home -- although my time in Boston and the Albany area was quite wonderful. Actually, wonderful is not quite the right word -- since it does not do justice to the richness of the time away. More later perhaps....

While trying to upgrade my wiki software this morning I broke my setup. Normally, I wouldn't consider that a problem -- where I messed up was trying to do an upgrade 15 minutes before I needed to hop in my car to get to a wedding! I did what I have told others not to do: to give oneself plenty of time in doing software installations (since errors are bound to happen, especially at the most inconvenient times!)

Now I'm trying to fix my setup but am running into other problems. Please be patient with me. (Besides, I'm about to head out to another, very important engagement -- so my wiki may be down for a while yet.)

On the white planes of my imagination grew tender shoots of grass. They were few in number but luxuriant in composition. You would expect them to be the type of grass that cows would heartily ruminate on. Not so our odd little cow. She had greater ambitions than to find her sustanance on the lowly plane/plain. The lunar sliver hung from the great ceiling, beckoning our friend to jump over the moon. Last time we saw her, she was standing on her hind legs, front legs in the air, head held up high. You might have thought her to be an oversized grasshopper, the way she was ready to spring forth. A grasshopper-cow, absurd on so many levels, was soon ecstatically in flight.

The falling sun set the city on fire
That enchanted night
And I wondered if flames came every night
Whether I saw or cared

Why shouldn't such phenomena occur
That lived beyond my ken?
Indeed even the little I ought to know
Is actually out of my hand.

When I was around 10 years old, I concluded that key to understanding the world was physics, specifically theoretical mathematical physics. I don't remember how I came to such a conclusion or exactly the arguments that buttressed such a view, but I was deeply affected by it. Albert Einstein was an early hero of mine. So was Dr. Who,
the BBC-based Time Lord who wandered not only the spatial but temporal
reaches of the cosmos. Both Einstein and Dr. Who were romantic figures
who mastered the essential nature of the world. I wanted to be like
them in their fame and in their fashion sense; Einstein's unkept mane
and the long scarf of the 4th Dr. Who figured large in my imagination. Thus did fame and fashion become linked to physics and ultimately to my Ph.D. work in Berkeley.

I don't know which is sadder: the row of unread books or the raft of unfilled binders sitting on my shelf.

Something I wrote on Saturday:

When I am sad, very sad, I often try to remind myself of all that I have to be thankful for as a way of making myself feel better. That practice often works so well that I feel selfish for treating thankfulness in such utilitarian terms. Shouldn't I be thankful for its own sake? How difficult then is it then for me to cultivate the discipline of thankfulness when I am happy, deliriously happy? I get caught up in the sheer pleasure of happiness that I lose sight of who and what might have contributed to that happiness: God, my family, my friends, the dumb luck of having had many opportunities falling in my lap. I take for granted what might withstand a taken-for-grantedness for a while, even a long while, but that ultimately wilts away with time and neglect. Today, I am thankful that I can be thankful, even for a short moment on this gloriously beautiful Saturday Berkeley afternoon.

Last Thursday, in a 1-1/2 hours session at the Free Speech Movement Cafe, I had one of the most productive spurts of work-oriented creativity in a while. There's something incredibly freeing about sitting before a pad of blank paper with several pens, some-multicolored, letting my mind wander in structured serendipity. At some point, I might scan in some of my "mind maps"/"cognitive maps"/scribbles to show better what I'm trying to do on paper that I have yet to pull off on a computer. I'm not one to insist that I'll be able to fully replace paper with digital media such as some researchers are aiming to. I like paper and pens and pencils too much to throw them out. And I skeptical about embedding digital technology into pen and paper fully -- though I'm prepared to be wrong on that front.

While I'm excited about my semi-verbal, visually situated, personally meaningful, even colorful mind maps, I've also been anxious to return to writing on my weblogs and in many other different forums. I have found writing to be an equally important way to sort out what's really going on in my head. There's writing to myself -- and then there's writing for other people. Of course, writing for others can take on many forms, but I have found the free form writing of my wiki and blog to be very liberating. There's an energy there that I often lose in more formal writing.

So what's the bottom line here? I will write more -- that's all I can hope to do. And as I write more, I hope that quality of expression and depth of thought will gradually increase.