Every day I dip into the inkwell and dip into the well of images.

While others of my kind prepare to travel off this planet, I know that this planet is truly a spaceship on a journey millions and millions of years in the making.

We think of ourselves as deliberately progressing, using imagery to say there is a concept called history that points to our developing more complicated combinations of states of energy and promises a future of better ways to complicate configurations we have thought about but haven’t constructed.

Yet, we know we are part of a bigger progression that we had no hand in making.

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line but an indirect journey is often more fun (i.e., our planet is spiralling through the universe).

Friends of mine intensely involved in raising their kids cannot believe I would be happy sitting here, these e-ink words made of images that do not exist.

Few can understand that a five-year old would see himself as an adult hermit, spending the rest of his childhood and much of his adulthood walking a path to a hermit’s doorway that doesn’t exist.

I only have my mother and father to verify that as a child I said I wanted to be hermit who dug ditches for a living.

When they are gone, I will have only myself to verify my simple existence.

So many of my friends seek relief for the tension and insecurity associated with their lives as employees working for someone else and/or a corporation, feeling more and more out of control the older they get.

We are convinced that we have to set and maintain a standard of living under control of at least one political entity that claims numerous rights to constantly take from us (money, property, family) in order to provide for the public good.

And in my part of the world, the “public good” means  political entities are about to topple over with too many people on the political entity payrolls.

[In other words, there are many ways to prevent a revolution, including the fact that few public employees will bite the hand that feeds them.]

How many people are out there whose definition of happiness does not revolve around financial success or recognition by one’s peers?

Without children, with a wife who can support herself financially without my help, with parents who can support themselves, with extended family who’ve never developed a habit of asking for my help, and with a personally-developed financial portfolio that grows continuously, I have this moment here.

At point one in my life, my parents joked that I had champagne taste and a beer-sized wallet, meaning I spent more than I made and depended on others to pick up my tab.

Hey, what can I say?  I was just being a good citizen, emulating my national government.

But those days are over, I tell myself.  Point two is here.

I met with the Committee last night to discuss how my leadership has affected the lives of the members of my species who reside on or near this planet.

The rotating Committee leadership role is not defined so we have no set time period or criteria for when a leader should return to the role of a regular member again.

I asked the Committee about a request I received to share some of my handwritten notes with people who come across this alternate universe of a blog.

The Committee did not reach a unanimous decision on this request, because some worried that my handwritten notes would identify specific members, or show how we make our decisions, giving away too much information that would confuse more than inform the masses.

So, I’m conducting a small test.

A hickory tree outside the window is leafing out.  Strong winds are passing through the woods, causing the hickory tree to bend back and forth like its neighbours.

I am reading some of my handwritten notes to the tree.

I see my reading and my words have little effect on the tree’s participation in living with other trees, birds, insects and atmospheric pressure changes.

Of course, the tree is not conscious of itself the way I and my species say we are conscious of ourselves.

Thus, reading aloud to a tree that is on the other side of a pane of glass is an alien concept to both of us.

Therefore, the Committee concludes, my notes might have the same effect on random readers.

To know how to effect/change a moment yet to exist is a lot of guesswork, blood, sweat and beers.

This time in which we live has a certain flavour, a smell, a colour, a feeling those who lived in it will talk about the rest of their lives, and will be reduced to a nostalgic, historic period that others who were not here will reference and never fully understand.

Look at it 1,000 years from now and you’ll easily figure out what’s gonna happen next.

Smell a honeysuckle bush or a field of shooting stars.

Oil the rotors of a helicopter and see the iridescent sheen.

Put your hand on the side of a dying deer and feel its billions of life forces fighting to stay alive together.

Taste the wind flowing across the leading edge of a turkey buzzard’s wings.

As a hermit, I welcome, rather than begrudge, the right of others to willingly join in and help shape our moment.

Relax and let the tension go.  Change is here and will never go away.  Change your perspective rather than worry about what you cannot control or don’t want to change.