Tangled branches ~ DES

A strange world it appears to be now, on the precipice of change. A few months hence, everything will perhaps be unrecognizable from what it has been before; the way we work, the way we relate, the way we live. At this point of time as a socially distant being, I feel like a sentient cog in the Internet of Things. I still am the human voice that commands my virtual assistants to dim the lights and make music travel with me throughout the house. I am constantly connected and so is a lot else around me. I welcome innovative change, but what is it about which is to happen next, that makes me balk with apprehension?

Inundated with information I have no time to assimilate, the media has also taken to infantilizing me by preconfiguring fact and opinion nuggets to digest and regurgitate, foisting lifestyles and behaviours to emulate, censoring or obliterating anything away from the norm as deviant, although I still believe in the algorithm, the holy triumvirate of Silicon Valley, the one percent and the Roman Senate … digital life everlasting, amen. It’s a consensual adaptation to a whole new creed and yet …

I think I still have reasons to be grateful, given that I entered this world genetically unmodified with all personal foibles intact. This feels like a positive because if I were to enter the age of Aquarius, to conjugate completely with the Internet of Things and subsume my flawed individuality to the collective, then I definitely would want to go in there cyber enhanced.

Through rose tinted glasses ~ DES

Nevertheless, today, still alive, breathing the less polluted air, assaulted by the high decibel shrieking birds, feeling hemmed in by the recent order for closure of all state parks, walking the same river circuit like a hamster on a wheel, I feel happy. The sky is not virtual reality in a room that changes texture and colour depending on my moods, in fact, it is real and I realize I have to adjust myself to the shenanigans of the weather. I find that I cannot change my reality at all, not even with Alexa at the moment, only my perception of it. And with this I am perfectly happy.

The colour of the setting sun and the flowers and a poem I wrote are through rose tinted glasses while listening to a favourite piece of Jazz by Israeli Bassist Avishai Cohen and his Trio.

‘Remembering’, that I used to listen to when times were grey, appeared in his 2004 album, aptly named for current times, ‘At home’. Cohen used to play on the streets of New York in the early stages of his musical journey; as he contends, “music makes one feel at home everywhere”, I would add, “and anywhere and at anytime”.

The sky made me remember today of things past, tinted on occasion by the rather gloomy present but like they say, every cloud has a silver lining …

Stringing Pearls

                       by Davina E. Solomon

Life reveals itself like a Sabian mystery;
Stringing pearls on nylon thread

Pearl, a measure of time
Time, a measure of life

Life breath flows fast like water
Across jagged rocks in youth

Or pools into a still reservoir
At the midday of the soul

And in the autumn of existence
Frozen, like a slow moving glacier

Even offending memories, so sacred
Lustrous pearls cast in nacre, steadily

By a protective mantle of an inner world,
to heal, to live, to remember…

Nautilus and pearl ~  DES