Smoke

22 March 2011

Smoke, smoke...I'd like to contemplate on that for a bit.
  What does smoke symbolize to us?  What lessons does it bear?

I've been thinking about chaos.

Chaos, as viewed through the lens of quantum physicx,
  is not what we perceive it to be.

What I mean is that we tend to associate chaos with disorder and crises.
  It bodes negative energy.

While it certainly is a huge 'stirring of the pot', chaos,
  looked at from a bird's eye perspective,
  is really creation, re-shaping, re-newingt, playing, testing, experimenting...

And if you look closely,
  you can see the emergent patterns and shapes,
  images of things to come.

So, we are both being stirred and doing the stirring!

The smoke, in that sense, represents
  the part of all of this that keeps us humble and awed
  by the creative power at work in our lives,
  for it is so far beyond our meager understanding.

The smoke stirrs us
  It fills our mouths with different tastes and sensations.
  It burns our eyes, clouds our vision, makes us look in different directions.
  And, it brings us together as community to work with it for the benefit of our community.

And, so we experiment, test ideas,
  re-shape ourselves to fit the new context,
  defined both by the smoke and by our actions in relation to the smoke.

In the end, we leave having been changed and having created change.
  Creation - before us, of us, from us...