Weaving Reality

The WeaveMothers were alternately amused and perplexed.  Weaving SpaceTime is a daunting task.  But the die had been cast ThereThen.

Those self-programmable units would have to be the answer.  At least for now, the spot weaving of the tapestry would have to rely on those limited creatures.  If only they didn’t have the bugs that caused them to sometimes go around and around in circles, sometimes get lost in mazes of amazing complexity, and too often fail to cooperate with each other in their common task.

But Uncertainty would always have the upper hand.

And it was quite worrying that they seem to have decided to create rules which were limiting their progress, cutting themselves off from some of the capabilities they had been created to use.

One of the WeaveMothers noticed a spot.  Mostly what might be called its eyes…its visual sensors, if vision was the right concept…were on the whole , but every once in a great while there were units which shown brightly.  Rarer still some of these units came together and produced the newness that expanded the possibilities instead of shrinking them.  

It might pay to keep an eye on this group, if only for the brightness it seems to produce.

My soul has been bared, naked before the Universe.

The web of my cognitive awareness is fragile, ready to crumble at any time.  It only takes a brief stumble, a mental stubbing of the toe, as it were, to collapse the whole structure.  We are ephemeral creatures.

All it takes is a little ice below my feet for me to lose my balance.  For a juggler, that’s a fatal condition.  And it’s not just one ball which will fall.  Interruption of the rhythm will cause almost all of them to tumble down.

Will I really know the difference between diving too deep and falling overboard?

It is also dangerous to blindly mix one’s metaphors.

This is the summer of my sixtieth year, perhaps thrice the number of years I once thought I would survive.  It is a time of reflection on the past and the attempt to imagine a future.  

I have striven to live a life worth living. Imagining that maybe it has even been a life worth relating, I have related it, as best I know how.  There it rests, unstably perched on fading memories.  Much of the support it needs in order to stand lies in the web of connections that have been made with others of my kind.  Those connections are also will-o-the-wisp, ignes fatui floating above the Tapestry of human existence, sometimes vanishing in an instant, sometimes eroding slowly from too much familiarity.

And there will be too many who believe that I am not one of their kind.

Awareness of the Tapestry comes with a price.  If one chooses the brightest colors, the threads can stand out, but the cost is dear.  Energy dwindles.

I burn my candle at both ends,

It will not last the night.

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends,

It gives a lovely light.

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

Why burn your candle at both ends, when you can attack it in the middle with an acetylene torch.  There’s less aesthetic value, but twice as many people can see the flame.

–Richard Fariña

Who may accuse you of being an exhibitionist and turn their backs.

Will I know when the day comes when deterioration will begin to win out?  Or how far I can go on beyond that point?  Will there ever come a day when doubts about the worthiness of my weaving will not have to be actively repelled?

All I can do is take another step along my path and continue to weave.  That is so much more enjoyable if all our paths are moving in the same general direction.

But what are the odds of that?  

So a color is selected for the thread of finest silk and woven both into the the infrastructure of the group, the structure of the HereNow and the superstructure of SpaceTime.

And the WeaveMothers may watch.