.: So the cold, an entity unto itself, has moved in tonight, but softly: I have stamped its ice and crystals off my shoes after running through the crisp field of snow and the dark sentinel army of the skeletal trees that form an ancient palisade around this house. But the soft echo of a shiver is still with me. I can hear the woods creaking still, the soft wind turning the scrape of branches and the shedding of snow into a reminder that this world so often speaks a language of things, a vocabulary of events that perhaps in turn inspire sound but really is the script of history. And not the history that I study, and claim to teach, but rather that history that is written in rings of dead bark and in the knucklebone, occult casting of fractured rock; a script that, like the glyphs at the heart of the kabbala, are alive and potent and speaking themselves.

Jax, the family dog, stood and stared for a while into the inpenetrable woods. I understood his animal notion, though did not elect to share his method. I instead closed my eyes and tried to hear.

My father had handed me a flashlight, and I took it rather than try to explain why I did not want it. But there it was, an instantaneous need to decline that arose from my chest as I looked at the blockish yellow and black super-powered black & decker spotlight– how could I take that profane torch into the sacred night of snow? But I took it from his hands, without a word. It was my father, and he, too, I understood. Better he know I have it.

After the ritual of listening, I tried to get Jax to roll in the snow with me, but he– in is rather spoiled regency here– would have none of it. In fact, I caught him looking at me askance. And I just had to ask him, “Jax, just what chaotic, schizophrenic, joyous and utterly mad God sits up there in the clouded heavens, mumbling rich and filthy profanities, while I– the human and arguably (oh so arguably) your master– roll on this earth and you– the animal here and let’s not mince words on that one– looks on with disdain? Just what kind of universe is this?!?”

Jax did not dignify my question with an answer. So be it.

Much that happened today confirmed my notion in Life’s joyously brutal capriciousness. It is a Silken Tent, a whimsy in the wind, but that tent is covering a rather nasty and brutish Carnival of Grotesques and a few slot machines. But I am not complaining, I officially add– I am… observing. A participant-observer, in deep anthropological righteousness, but making an observation nonetheless.

I watched a patch of ice (what one might consider the result of a massive and ancient trajectory of nature) intersect with a car (one might consider this another trajectory, though less massive and ancient yet still quite immense; that of human cultural innovation) and cause an instant of gut-wrenching horror involving a sedan, a pick-up truck, and 2 schoolbuses. As my mother an I pulled away, it was apparent that several of those involved were doing quite poorly, possibly dead.

If one wants to meditate on the exponential power of the moment, or speculate on the fractal explosions of a chaotic life, one has to look no further than the everyday car wreck. One microsecond, one miscalculation, expands the possibility-frontier so alarmingly fast to a point so alarmingly wide, that of course its collapse to reality is invariably shocking and destructive. It makes me wonder just what teeming mass of brutal possibility lurks under everyday actions, like a pit of poisonous vipers in an unstable chemical state.

Ahhhh but there it is; I have strayed from my original point, and my head now pounds with the import of possibility.