April 12, 2025 – B

It occurs to me that we have all had the same problem from the first of us to here, now, and that is coming to consciousness in a world that requires us to make sense of what’s what. 

We start with hearsay to work with and mesh that with our experience of life as we find it, including what other people tell us about what they have done with it, folding it into a “reasonable,” to us, frame work and calling it “how things are.”

Reality becomes what we say it is, and should always have quotation marks around it as “Reality” because it is never more than we make it out to be, and we have no way of grasping it "as it is," only as it "appears (to us) to be," here, now.

We tell ourselves stories which we repeat to one another throughout generations, embellishing it over time.

The hermits in their huts and caves have their way of seeing things, and the rest of us have our way of seeing things, and that is all there is, how we see things.

No one knows what they are talking about, or what to make of any of it. It works for us for a lifetime, or not, and then we die.

Until then, we are just passing the time as comfortably as possible, like Black Elk and Chief Seattle did before us. I think the best we can hope for is to find--and be--good company along the way.