• Do you remember life as a child?
  When you woke in the morning, and the morning smiled?
  
  -- Taj Mahal
  

i'm constitutionally drawn to examine and try to distill essences, principles, highlights, and hence often challenged by the composition, the constellations of life's details. the myriadicity of life demands wider attention, and perhaps reluctantly, i've come to enjoy not just the question, "what is it that i'm noticing?", but also, "what am i not noticing?" i have found in the latter a kind of calibration, without which i am much more prone to go astray. in taking some liberty to not fixate - instead, to wander, to graze, to play with experience - i feel able to more fully arrive where i actually am. accurate or not, the greater sensation of participating is, in itself, valuable.

• Seriousness always has to do with an established script, an ordering of affairs completed somewhere outside our range of influence. We are playful when we engage others at the level of choice, when there is no telling in advance where our relationship with them will come out - when, in fact, no one has an outcome to be imposed on the relationship, apart from the decision to continue it.

  -- James P Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

those wider vistas are where gentle, generous humor - whimsy - is found - as are darker things, and everything between:

• You have to be willing to go into the chaos to bring back the beauties.

  -- Tess Gallagher

• I tell you: one must have chaos within to give birth to a dancing star.

  -- Nietzsche

imagination also resides in the spaces between details, the correspondences and parallels, and is the foundation of metaphor:

• Those at the center can imagine what it is to be outside. The strong can imagine what it is to be weak. Illuminated lives can imagine the dark. Poets in their twilight can imagine the borders of stellar fire. We strangers can imagine the familiar hearts of strangers.

  -- Cynthia Ozick, The Moral Necessity of Metaphor, Harpers 5/86

• Everything in the world is wonderfully and magnificently mixed up. It is exactly like a woven tapestry. A tapestry to bring tears to your eyes...

  True, it is very easy to get into a muddle, but there is one magic formula for keeping out of muddles. I'll sell you that formula, oh dreamer. There, take it. Here it is: look.. Look. Look. That's all there is to it. Look - and that's all. Look, even when you want to screw up your eyes. Look, even when you don't like what you see. Look, even when it's not what you expected. Remember, the world is never wrong. What is - is. Even if you hate something in the world and want to destroy it - look. Otherwise you will destroy the wrong thing. Get me?

  -- Yevgeny Shwartz

please stare
worship a thousand tiny gardens
swim some luscious summer lake
& drive shadow's frantic storm
away

memory, i protest, is a promise
in bad faith.  like the residue
of fading dreams in morning's light,
divorced from the wisdom
of their discovery,
it fades, and shifts,
and yields to the highest bidder.

and in the midst of shadows,
earnest or disloyal, i still hope
to sometimes stumble
on simple truth
and have it be familiar.

time
in finite mercy
is left handed.
it complements
with
obligation, liberty;
reverie, loss.

time
spins in mute splendor
as vacant gods
give and take
with unbridled generosity
nothing at all
and everything.

ever so
antidote
wry grin
slight chasm
vital signs
such
such and so
idiom attic
gone awry
equipoise
imposture
slight of hand
ever so slightly
humid ditty
footprints
absolute zero
aspect ratio
spin in ning
grim thimbles

parsley turnip
resilience, ebullience, emergence, effulgence
executive seating
elusive presence
passed tense, secret heart
right of passage, wrong wrong wrong
ever so, so pervasive
disrupt enclave carpet tactics
since before forever
time lapsed
filial loyalty
surprisingly sometimes
    (so much more than never)

ish ka bibble, fit and fiddle,
momraths outgrabe.
tu ra lura, whine and cheese,
celery and marmalade.

compositional - connections, contrasts and consonance
fascinating, enough that stuff around you is a surprise once you stop
quest: "between" not and dancing - pedestrian to dance, confidence
quest: gradual convergence, divergence
quest: dancing with others in the same manner that your body parts
  coordinate when you're moving yourself.

"recall the rain gift," she said,
"always shine."
a goddess whispers through cool beauty,
"why moan about the wind?"
language sleeps
and moments are a place, a dream...

for different word play, see Silly Craft.

Woven