Like Leaves On The Forest Floor

June 28th, 2024

Me and my niece are sitting here on the couch, laptops out, tackling our urges toward purpose, importance, love, and the like. Of course, I'm here to craft and article, and she's here to play and hang with me. She had hers open before me, so it may be more than standard coincidence which has brought us to these moments now.

I am so happy for her. A toy laptop is one of those things that I wish I could have had as a kid. It's as they say: we want our younger generations to have more than we did.

It is doubtless the sign of the times, anyway. Every generation must deal with the emergence of miracles of innumerable spectrums; be it technologies, social principles, et al. As a 32-year-old (and almost on my way out of that age, at that), I have seen the dawn of the PlayStation and the obsolescence of the VCR, the coming and going of the GameCube, Game Boy Color, and Wii, the slimming of Dell desktops toward the iMac, the birth of Snapchat and TikTok and the expression of visuals and audios to shine with them, and so on. I have witnessed dreams put to the grind, with some weathering the storm and others being whisked away until the cows come home.

It has been my journey, and will continue to be repurposed to be so. And if that's the way it has to be, it will only bring us closer together; at the very least in dreaming.

*

So as to the title of the article, it emerged from a visual-metaphor I came upon in the lead-up to typing, reverse engineered to relevance and significance (to me): that such "leaves" are clues to the source or hierarchy which supplants (no pun intended) them.

To put it another way (which I am not saying is accurate or not--I am simply working from my imagination), it is like looking beyond the fact that the cart has been put before the horse (and not looking that gift horse in the mouth, even, to layer it and confuse you further) so as to focus on and access its payload, and in doing so, determine what is being towed in the first place, and why.

Say we each, in some unknown realm, possess some esoteric forest which stands as a testament to who we are; which shifts and consolidates itself to uphold our definition. The trees in such a forest are not strictly planted, and even mowed down at all. They are uncovered, actualized, revealed seemingly out of nowhere, brought in from the outside, bloomed out of collaboration. It is a realm beyond the senses, at any time feeding on them, their elements bursting through them in droves, our senses knowing and lost in their might and their fury.

I'll leave it at that. Like I said, it remains a simple exercise of my imagination. For a purpose, truly; but still an exercise, and a suggestion.

*

The bottom line is, really, that I deal in the intangible; that I work from behind enemy lines, so to speak (the phrase popped into my mind, and I decided to include it--no more reason than that; I have only the most tangent military associations in my life). You might say that Men At Work suggested it best with "People Just Love To Play With Words". You could even try (insert your instinct here) out for distance. All in all, it comes down to that perception of "gift" inside, and how effectively we interface with the world to bring divine wealth to it.

However, at the end of the day, it is all simply "business as usual".