Costco hot dog and 20 oz. pop: $1.50

Costco French Fries: $2.29

40 minutes alone with my thoughts and fancies and this high-tech Apple miracle gizmo: invaluable.

So I’m sitting here in Costco sort of free associating on a few thoughts that have put up shoots in the last post or two, with input from William at CiderPress and Dee at Miss Demure Restraint. Demure? Restraint? I’ll leave that one for Dee.

Anyway, the truck is parked out in the lot, tarped to be sure, lest it take on a Hitchcockian Bird thing with crows, ravens, and magpies.

Pondering over ideas related to communal, organic, groups I was recalling Black Elk’s referring to the ‘circle’ of his nation, and how he experienced the withering of its Sacred Tree during the course of his life.

And then merging the image of a nation’s hoop or circle with the idea of such a community having a more or less allotted lifespan, along with our modern day penchant for expressing a need to ‘think outside the box’, and I came up with the above diagram.

Ties in nicely with the idea of being a sperm cell in an aging body too. What’s the sperm count in a single ejaculation? Something to the tune of 40 million, isn’t it? Maybe that’s what’s going on all around us today, with all this blogging and New Agey stuff we read and hear of. A straining towards what is to come. Spasms with the aim of fertilizing the future.

All right, I’ll leave that one go.

But the circle of youth, formless and full of potential, growing progressively squarer with age; I like that. Works on the human level as well as the communal. From the magic and poetry of youth to the knowledge and understanding of old age, just as from the nascent circular village community to our modern day square-built metropolises we have the entire life course of a human being as well as a civilization.

Isn’t this whole New Age movement about escaping the modern day box and recapturing the wholistic, circular innocence and outlook of youth? That and finding balance, I suppose. But what is balance if not a desire to round the edges of the box we find ourselves inhabiting–that is if it isn’t in us to escape or otherwise free ourselves altogether from the box’s confines.

Time to put this one to bed, so to speak.

There is so much learning and knowledge today. The problems we face are seemingly so complex how is any one man or woman to encompass them all? Our ability to build computers that can handle unimaginably vast quantities of information has not led to a single answer we can all agree on. Where or to whom can we turn?

All a casting about inside the box.

“Nor can a mind that is filled with knowledge perceive what truth is; only a mind that is completely capable of learning can do that; learning is not the accumulation of knowledge; learning is a movement from moment to moment.”—Krishnamurti, You Are The World

“Now, when the social organism is in fragments, when criticism has taken up everything in order to destroy and refound everything, a hero appears…who will sustain the temple on his shoulder and gather up in the silence of his generous and despairing heart the love which has abandoned the multitudes.”–Elie Faure, The Dance Over Fire And Water